


points of attachment

by gruhukens



Category: Dark Matter - Michelle Paver
Genre: Acrophobia, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Caves, Claustrophobia, Found Families, M/M, Miscommunication, Mutual Pining, darkmatterexchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:32:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 33,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21513997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gruhukens/pseuds/gruhukens
Summary: When you go caving, you carry your lights with you through a system made up almost entirely of darkness. In reality, the natural state of a cave is so dark that absolutely nothing can be seen. But when you go caving, you rarely ever see this, because wherever you look all you know is the light you bring with you.If he was forced to, Jack would admit he thinks knowing Gus and the others is like this: like he's been lost in the passages for years and someone has finally handed him a light.A gift for the Dark Matter 2019 Gift Exchange.
Relationships: Gus Balfour/Jack Miller
Comments: 43
Kudos: 20





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yewgrove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yewgrove/gifts).

> this fic is inspired by two things:
> 
> 1) the subtitle: “What If They Weren’t All Dicks To Each Other In The First Place: just an exploration of a crowd o’ boys loving jack miller”, bc sometimes I wonder how different things might have been if they were all close to each other!! i've fudged some details about all of them but nothing major
> 
> 2) when i was trying to think about a realistic modern au, i was like how can i update this? what's the scariest thing i know? turns out that's using ropes to climb in caving, which you have to do 100% by yourself and is very very complicated and very dangerous. the specific moment when you move from one piece of safety equipment from another and you just drop for a second into the abyss in the darkness and have to trust you’ve done it right… while writing this story i tried explaining it to my partner while they were drunk and they stopped me six times to tell me it was too scary. i hope that it comes across even a little bit even tho it is SO complicated to explain, bc it scares me shitless every time i do it.
> 
> for any unfamiliar terminology, a list of caving vocab can be found at the end. primary content warnings for this story are: enclosed spaces, heights, canon-typical scariness and grief/mourning although the last is NOT a major theme of this work.

It is a miserable evening.

Truth be told, by the time Jack finds himself pushing through the doors of the White Lion, shaking the rainwater off his hood, he’s already regretting the decision to come out. The pub is further away than it had looked on Google Maps, far away enough from his halls that he’s completely soaked by the time he’s here despite his raincoat. And anyway, even though it’s only the first week of term, the work has already started to pile up: tutorials on tutorials, core texts and wider reading coming out of his ears. He has things he could be doing, things with more relevance to his life than checking out a society he stumbled across on Facebook. But here he is.

The group, as suggested on their post, are easy enough to spot. Through the Friday evening crowd, he can see three of them are wearing dirty yellow helmets and one of them has a complicated harness get-up looped around his waist and over his shoulders. A costly-looking harness get-up. They’ve claimed a corner and two of them have their arms slung over each other’s shoulders, laughing at a joke one of them has clearly just made.

Jack doesn’t know what’s more intimidating: the obvious expense of their equipment, or their familiar camaraderie. Nervous, he stops just inside for a moment to collect himself, but while he’s hovering by the door, a tall, black-haired boy catches his gaze and pushes through the crowd towards him.

“Here for Caving?” he says, cheerfully. His vowels are so polished Jack thinks he could cut himself on them.

Jack rubs his thumb over the hole in his jumper sleeve and reminds himself of what he's been promising himself, endlessly, since he stepped off the train in this town: he was picked above so many others; he’s good enough to be here; he’s got every right to take advantage of the opportunities Oxford provides. All the opportunities. Even the weird, left-field ones.

So he drums up a smile and a handshake and doesn’t try to elevate his accent as he says, ‘Yeah! Nice to meet you.”

The dark-haired boy smiles at him in return, then grabs Jack’s proffered hand and starts to tug him over through the crowd to the circle: startled, Jack lets him. By the time he’s registered his own discomfort, they’ve arrived at the edge of the circle and the other boy has dropped his hand with a smile.

He takes a moment to collect himself. To his unending gratitude, they both just hover on the edges for the time being: from the way the boy had dragged him over, Jack had been having nightmare visions of being pushed to the centre and made to introduce himself in a cruel secondary-school kind of fashion. But the dark-haired boy – Hugo, he introduces himself – quietly makes the kind of casual-but-upbeat, painfully-Oxford conversation that Jack is still trying to get used to (“Been to any bops? How’s Michaelmas treating you so far? Met your scout yet?”) until there’s a natural gap in the group’s discussion and then he slides in, bringing Jack with him.

The rest of the boys around the table all grin at him and the conversation immediately goes back to collections, which Jack discovers with a dawning horror are start-of-term exams. When he – nervously – expresses his horror at the concept, one of the boys groans in agreement and slaps him on the back and someone else puts a drink into his hands, while Hugo next to him assures him first years don’t have them.

And it’s easy, after that: for a while he just stands in the circle with the rest of them, nursing his drink and listening to the rest of them talk, occasionally making a comment but mostly just content to stand and listen. Every now and then, a pint will appear in his hands. When he protests, Hugo tells him it’s coming out of the club’s budget with a wink and a smile. And after a little while they move to another pub, and as they stumble down the street he strikes up a conversation with one of the other boys – tall and dark haired like Hugo, but pale – about rowing and how strange it is that everyone in the university seems to be unhealthily obsessed with it, and all the others pile in with their opinions.

And then before he knows it, Jack realises it is 2am, they’re about four pubs in and he has never been out so late in his life. Or drunk so much. But it’s ok – he is, he thinks, having fun! And making friends! He can’t remember anyone’s name! But that’s ok too! Because they’re all friends! And he likes them very much! Especially the tall, blond guy who keeps smiling at him!

“Gus!” the guy says suddenly. Jack realises with a start they are suddenly squashed next to each other in a booth in a pub he doesn’t remember entering. He is slurring a little and clearly drunk, but still perhaps the happiest guy Jack has ever seen. He is also wearing a cricket jumper under his harness. At any other time, Jack thinks this would be perhaps the most pretentious thing he’s ever seen but the sincerity and happiness with which this boy is smiling at him is, unbelievably, helping to carry it off.

“I’m Gus!” he continues. “I didn’t catch your name! Who are you!”

He offers his hand. Jack, bemused and not a little enchanted, takes it and they shake very sloppily. The first dark-haired boy, who Jack remembers with no small amount of effort is called Hugo, elbows him in the ribs with a power and precision that can only be derived from large amounts of gin.

“He’s fresh,” says Hugo over his head, “and keen! He’s said he’s coming caving with us! Tomorrow!”

Jack did not. Or if he did, he emphatically cannot remember doing so. But Gus’ face – already bright with a sweet kind of drunken inner joy – brightens further, and almost without meaning to, Jack finds himself saying, “Uh, yeah, ok! Cool!”

Hugo roars and pounds him on the back. Gus positively _beams _at him. On the other side of the table, the two other boys are drunkenly raising their pint glasses to him, clearly reacting mostly to the enormous noise that Hugo is making next to him.

Jack, pleased and drunk and feeling foolish, ducks his head.

* * *

By the next morning, his good mood has entirely evaporated.

It isn’t the thought of caving, so much. It’s the getting there. What nobody had thought about telling him at the pub was that caves were, in fact, thin on the ground in Oxfordshire. Thin on the ground in a lot of the UK, apparently, so for their first trip they’re taking a two-and-a-half hour drive in one of the other boys’ very, very expensive looking cars to a system in South Wales. 150 miles away. In a different country.

Jack becomes aware of this only when he turns up at the shiny caving hut at a truly disgusting hour for a Saturday morning and has the situation explained to him off-handedly by the tall, pale boy he’s sure is named something completely Oxford like Tatler or Titus. He feels he really should know it, but they’d exchanged names only at 2am stumbling between pubs, so the chances are recalling it are shamefully low.

For everyone else, he’s sure it’s not a problem. Except that it means five hours of combining some of his least-favourite things into one sure-to-be-awful experience: enforced socialising, enforced socialising with strangers, very expensive cars, and wasting time when he could be working or studying. And a new least-favourite thing: the splitting headache he has been nursing since he woke up at seven.

The part of him that's regretting not just turning over and going back to sleep when his alarm began to blare this morning is suggesting a polite excuse and a tactical retreat. But it's not quite strong enough to quash, well - not just the curiosity that he's been nursing since the suggested page popped up on his Facebook feed, but also a weird kind of entitlement, almost, that has been growing ever since he'd been invited to interview: the idea that he can do anything that anyone else here can do, even if they don't think he can, even if he doesn't really want to, just to prove to himself he can.

So he steels himself, taps Hugo on the shoulder and asks if he can lend a hand. If it's that bad, he supposes, he doesn't have to come back.

Mercifully, there is little milling around after that as he's directed to help sort helmets, lights, wellies, and what look like bags made out of tarp with almost military precision. He collects a muddy oversuit, a pair of wellies, a thick belt and a dirty helmet that rubs distractingly against his hearing aid whenever he moves his head.

When he asks about the harness that the boy in the cricket jumper was wearing the previous evening, Hugo laughs.

“Not yet, old boy,” he says. “Not on your first day. That’s for _serious_ caving. We’ll get you there if you want to go, though, so don’t worry.”

Within ten minutes, all the kit is packed and stowed in the back of the Porsche or Jaguar or whatever’s driving them to Brecon, and Hugo and the other boy (whose name Jack recalls, with some relief, as Teddy) have claimed the front seats.

Jack clambers carefully into the back. Sitting next to him is the blonde boy in the cricket jumper he’d met last night, fiddling with a headtorch. He has swapped out the cricket jumper for a more faded sweatshirt and, unbelievably, jogging bottoms. Somehow, the informal get-up makes him seem even less casual, like he’s playing at being a real boy.

He reintroduces himself thoughtfully as they buckle themselves in – “Gus,” he says, “nice to meet you again!” – and holds out a hand for Jack to shake again. It is no less charming this morning than it was the night before. As they peel out of the car park, Jack shakes it gingerly.

On the drive, they burn through a lot of topics very fast: it is a long way to Wales, after all, and after ascertaining that Gus reads Geography and Jack reads Theoretical Physics, and therefore have no crossover whatsoever, that Jack is from London and Gus is from Somerset and have never been to either place, and that neither of them have joined any other groups or societies, the conversation kind of peters out.

For a while they sit in silence: Jack busies himself watching the scenery go by, and on the other side of the car Gus does the same. But it’s not uncomfortable. Every now and then Gus will catch Jack’s eye and he’ll just smile, completely relaxed. Jack thinks he has never met someone so absolutely unselfconscious before. It’s almost alien. But it’s not uncomfortable.

Finally, Jack breaks the silence to ask about where they’re going. The closer they get, the more he realises he is genuinely quite nervous – it’s not like him to make spur-of-the-moment decisions, especially when he has no idea what exactly he’s getting himself in for, and he’d rather know as much as possible before he gets in too deep.

In response, Gus’ eyes light up in much the same way they had the night before.

“The cave we’re headed to is called CDD2. Well, at least the entrance is: it’s one way into a complicated system, but it’s pretty easy and the pay-off is amazing! Honestly, it’s the perfect cave for beginners,” he says, and he’s already off and gesticulating. Jack is beginning to sense that whatever Gus lacks in self-consciousness, he makes up for in enthusiasm.

“There’s no squeezes – that’s tiny tunnels we have to crawl through, they can be quite frightening,’ he explains. ‘And there’s no climbs, just some gentle scrambling and a few ravines. You practically walk the whole way. And the formations are amazing, wait until you see the Sceptre.” Gus shapes it with his hands. “It’s a massive stalactite, ancient and completely pristine. Honestly, it’s unbelievable. It’s a perfect beginner’s cave, really. You’ll really get a feel for the whole thing. You’re going to love it.”

“Oh, don’t forget the Midnight Tunnel,” says Hugo from the driver’s seat. “The mineral deposits are incredible, like a night sky over your head. When you swing your headtorch around, they just _glow_. You just need to cross Treasurer’s Fall to get there, but honestly, it makes it all the more worth it.”

“What’s Treasurer’s Fall?” asks Jack cautiously.

Teddy swings around bodily from the front passenger seat to grace Jack with a truly evil smile.

“How are you with heights?” he says.

* * *

Unfortunately, Jack has never really had a need to think about this question before; to his dismay, it turns out the answer is not good.

Perhaps more unfortunately, he doesn’t find this out until he’s halfway across Treasurer’s Fall.

The rest of the cave had been fun. More challenging than he had expected: somehow, he’d assumed that caves would all have flat, easily walkable floors, but he’s been crawling up and down slopes and rock piles almost since the cave entrance – sometimes also wading through streams, sometimes scrambling down rocky pathways, sometimes crawling briefly through tight spaces in the rock.

Once, memorably, Teddy had encouraged him to use the natural footholes in the walls to climb over a series of particularly deep pools in an underground stream: he’d shoved his feet in cracks either side of the narrow passageway a few feet above the floor and made it a fair way before having to drop back down to the streamway below. Not that it mattered too much when he landed in the stream: his wellies were already full of water before he’d gone ten minutes into the cave, but he’d found it was surprisingly fun to use his whole body to try and figure out the best way to get over something.

Treasurer’s Fall is very different from that. Treasurer’s Fall is terrifying.

It’s a passage much like the others they’ve been making their way through so far, except this one is missing half its floor. Tall, but nicely wide enough that he can brace his back against the left wall and his palms against the right and still keep his arms straight. Under his feet is a small, slippery ledge, just wide enough for him to shuffle along. But that ledge slopes slightly downwards until it shears away entirely just in front of his toes, and the narrow ravine that gapes just beneath him is maybe twenty feet deep.

He gets maybe halfway across it by blind optimism before the potential consequences of what he's doing sink in, and then for some reason he can't quite get his feet to start moving again.

It's a survivable distance, he tells himself, trying to look both down into the ravine and also anywhere else at the same time. It's probably completely survivable. Unless he hits his head wrong, or his back. Maybe he’ll just break an arm or a leg, and then he won’t be able to climb out. Would the others get him out? How would they do that? Maybe they’d leave him there?

‘Hey,’ says Hugo from the other end of the passage, just five feet away. ‘Look at me.’

Jack does, briefly forgetting that his helmet-mounted torch blinds anyone he looks at directly. He angles the beam above Hugo’s head instead, still casting enough light that he can see Hugo smiling at him, relaxed and confident.

Behind him, where Teddy and Gus are standing, the passage opens up into a chamber with a wide, solid floor. Jack wants to be on it more than anything else in the _world_.

“One foot at a time,” says Hugo, still smiling. “Honestly, the worst part is getting onto it.”

“I think the worst part would be falling off it,” says Jack through clenched teeth.

“Except that you won’t,” says Hugo with an infuriating calmness. “You’re halfway there already. You might as well get it over and done with. Just a few more feet.”

“And how are you going to convince me to come back across it?”

Hugo laughs.

“You’ll have to. No other way out, unless you really want to get stuck into this system. So you’ll just do it and then it’ll be over,” he says. “Truly, gearing up for it, thinking about it is the worst part. Once you’re on it, just do it. Get across it. Hey, sometimes it helps if you sing.”

“Like _fuck_,” says Jack with a lot of heart, but he forces himself to start moving again.

When he reaches the other side of the ravine, he stumbles off but doesn’t stop moving until he hits a wall a few feet over on the other side of the chamber. He rests his forehead and palms on the rock and just breathes, thinking of nothing at all. The solid rock is almost shamefully reassuring under his hands.

Quietly, Hugo comes up behind him and lays a palm gently on his shoulder.

“Grand?” he says. Jack wrinkles his nose, but he nods, and after a few seconds he’s surprised to find he means it.

“Not when I was doing it,” he says, lifting his head off the rock and turning to face Hugo. “But now that I’ve done it… I did it. It really feels like I _did_ something, you know?”

Hugo laughs delightedly and claps a hand on his back.

“_That’s _my boy,” he says. 

“Is it always like this?” says Jack, only very slightly out of fear.

Behind Hugo, Gus and Teddy are smiling at him, big wide smiles on faces smeared with mud, illuminated only by the light of Jack’s torch. They look the same kind of exhilarated as Jack feels.

“Terrifying as fuck?” says Teddy, “but also kind of amazing? Yes. Every time.”

* * *

After that, it’s only a short easy walk to Midnight Tunnel, which turns out to be the most unexpectedly incredible thing Jack has ever seen.

It’s a fairly wide, comfortably tall passage with the smoothest, flattest floor of the whole cave yet. As they walk through, above their heads, the mineral deposits in the ceiling glow like stars. When Jack sweeps his headtorch across them, whole constellations burst and fade above him. It’s like nothing he’s ever seen before.

Gus comes up beside him and Jack is too entranced to hide how impressed he is – “Look,” he says, as if Gus has never seen it before, “just _look_ at how incredible this is!” – but Gus seems genuinely happy to watch Jack enjoying the ceiling, and Jack is happy to enjoy Gus enjoying his enjoyment. None of the other boys ahead seem particularly pressed about hurrying onwards so they walk slowly side-by-side, heads craned up to the ceiling, until it's just solid rock again. It's only a minute or two after that that they run out of passage and Hugo decides it’s time for them to turn back and head out.

The second time around, Treasurer’s Fall is a little less awful, mostly because Jack decides to take Hugo’s advice and just try his best to press through it without thinking about it. There’s a terrifying moment close to the end where Jack’s foot slips as he places it on the wrong part of the muddy ledge, but he’s close enough that he can grab Gus’ arm for support where Gus has already passed through. Gus hauls him forwards and together they get him onto the solid rock of the chamber floor without too much trouble. Before he thinks too hard about it, Jack presses his helmet against Gus’ in a gesture of thanks, and Gus smiles at him warmly and squeezes where he’s still got his hand clasped around Jack’s arm.

After that, it feels like the rest of the cave is over before it’s even begun. When he reaches the top again, climbing through the tiny hole that makes up the cave entrance, he closes his eyes immediately. He has never, he realised, thought about the smell and the texture of the air so acutely before, but scrambling up the last eight, ten metres of the cave he could feel the air change as he approached the outside. And pushing himself through, standing under that wide, drizzling sky: it feels like being born again, taking in the fresh wind through his lungs. It’s beautiful.

He spreads his arms wide before he realises it might look weird, but when Gus gives him a genuine, happy grin and claps him on the shoulders, he doesn’t lower them. Even better is seeing Gus turn that grin on the others and shoving him gently in the shoulder as he does so, Teddy and Hugo smiling back at them as if to say, _he’s got promise. Maybe he’s one of us._


	2. Chapter 2

After that, things escalate in a way which is both easy and the most terrifying thing Jack has ever experienced.

Jack does not, as a rule, have a lot of friends. Has never, perhaps, had a lot of friends. If asked, he might say that he doesn’t really feel the need for them. So it’s a strange experience to come out every Friday to a pub where, every week without fail, there they are: a group of people who like his company and cheer when they see him, and never stop asking if they can buy him drinks, no matter how many times he says no.

And it’s strange that he wants to show up every Friday. He thinks that it might be just something about having a hobby dangerous enough that you really have to trust the people around you to look after you, but it could also have something to do with the fact that he actually, you know. Likes them as people. Some irritating quirks aside, of course. He would pay good money for Teddy to stop belting out ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ across the pub whenever Jack steps through the door, but, he thinks wryly, you can’t have everything.

It’s even stranger when it stops being just a Friday thing and starts being a whenever, wherever thing: without fail, whenever they see him in the hall Hugo will wave him over to what has clearly become their table, and after a certain amount of perseverance, it becomes natural for him to drop into the benches next to them at lunch and dinner without even thinking about it, to watch Hugo and Teddy throw rolls at each other and Algie try desperately to revise at the table without the others getting gravy on his notes.

And Teddy insists on adding him to their various club chats: although Jack solidly protests his hatred of group messaging, the chats are small enough and relaxed enough that Jack never feels the pressured into posting, which means that he’s comfortable actually doing so. It helps that Hugo and Gus both direct a lot of texts at him to start with – Gus, endearingly, texts like he talks, more exclamation points than words – so Jack doesn’t need to decide when to jump in. The first time he opens up his phone to see Gus text him directly, his stomach does a very weird thing inside.

It goes on like this, strange and new and wonderful, for maybe a month, until Jack finds himself in the unfortunate position of having to look for a new room.

Jack’s not a library studier by nature. He mostly likes to study by night when the library's closed, so he has his desk in his room set up the way he likes it, and he can brew coffee in what passes for a kitchen in his flat. So most of the time that he’s not in tutorials – or, more and more often, hanging out with the cavers - he’ll be holed up in his room.

The music from the next room along starts during second week and doesn’t really seem to end, no matter how many times Jack politely knocks on the door, and then not-so-politely thumps on the wall. The bass boost in particular is a horrific touch that seems to worm its way through even the loudest of relaxing study playlists Jack is blasting through his headphones: he thinks the whoever’s living next to him has pushed their speaker right up against their shared wall. He sees the guy once or twice – young, white and rich-sounding, like pretty much everyone else at his college – and he even apologises to Jack a number of times, but it never seems to quite stick. It’s inescapable, infuriating and, when he realises exactly how difficult he finds it to concentrate on his work or even sometimes to sleep, genuinely quite panic-inducing.

After two weeks, Jack goes to speak to the lodge, who send off what he’s sure are several strongly-worded but effectively useless emails and organising a very uncomfortable face-to-face. Nothing works. Furious at having to deal with a situation he never even created, he gets snappish, stops answering texts and starts skipping the hall so he doesn’t have to make the effort to pretend he’s in a good mood at lunch.

This doesn’t stop Hugo and Gus from showing up on his doorstep on Friday evening to drag him out for their regular drinks. Neither will they tell him how they found out where he lives: Hugo just waggles his eyebrows.

“It’s my handsome face,” he informs Jack seriously, leaning on the door-frame. “The same handsome face that’s going to convince you to put down the books and come out with us this evening. We haven’t seen you all week!”

Jack grimaces.

“I’m busy,” he says. “Lots of work to do.”

He’s not lying - the room from next door is mercifully quiet, and he’s been meaning to crack on with his uncertainty principle notes while he can – but he also feels guilty for being rude and cold to everyone all week, and angry about feeling guilty, and exhausted about feeling angry, and if he’s being completely honest with himself, he’d rather hole up in his room than really think about any of it.

Gus regards him expressionlessly for a minute, and then turns to Hugo.

“Would you give us a minute?” he asks politely.

Jack watches Hugo walk down the hall with a deepening sense of foreboding.

“Listen,” Gus starts, quietly and earnestly, “maybe I’m getting this wrong and you can tell me to fuck off, that’s fine, I don’t mind. I just – I know what it’s like to feel the pressure to exceed in this place at the cost of everything else, and I don’t want it to stop you doing other things outside your work. You’re more than the work you do for this course, Jack, and I don’t think that working yourself to death is good for you. I understand that it must be difficult for you, of all people, but you don’t have to work so hard to prove you belong here.”

Jack is completely caught off guard. Gus is wrong, of course – it wasn’t really about the work as much as it is about Jack’s stupid flatmate and his own short temper – but in some of the ways that matters, he’s right. He does feel the pressure of this place, and maybe that’s why it’s been panicking him so much.

But it hurts to have Gus blunder right into it, like he’s blindly sticking his fingers into a raw wound. _You, of all people_. Because Gus knows he’s not the same as the rest of them – the wrong class, the the wrong accent, the wrong income bracket. Stupidly, he’d thought that maybe the others hadn’t even noticed, and it hurts, to have Gus – _Gus, _who if pushed Jack would grudgingly admit he gets on best with, who he likes more than he'd ever expected to, always kind and funny and friendly – to be the one to point out that he’s _different._

“You _don’t _–“ he says, and finds that he’s suddenly incensed. “You can’t understand – you and the others, you were _made_ for this place. You _wear _this place. It matters that I’m here in a way that it doesn’t matter for the rest of you. It’s not the same.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Gus says, frowning. “I’m not – I’m not _saying_ it’s the same.”

“What _are_ you saying?” says Jack, bitterly. “That you understand? What it's like for me, to be here?”

“No, I just – well, maybe, I suppose I just meant that I know what it feels like,” says Gus, looking frustrated. ‘This university, the - expectations it puts on you.”

Jack gives a very harsh laugh. “What could you possibly understand about _expectations_?” he shoots back, bitingly.

In the lengthy silence that falls after his words, Jack’s stomach falls into his boots. He looks at Gus – really _looks_ at him. Gus is, in essence, larger than life: more earnest, more joyful, more honest than anyone Jack has ever met before. But standing on Jack’s doorstep, hands shoved in his pockets, he looks – pale. Closed in on himself. It occurs to him that for all they’ve been spending a lot of time together recently, there’s so much he still really doesn’t know about Gus. He feels terribly lonely, all of a sudden.

“I’m – sorry,” he says, only a little begrudgingly. Even if he's not, entirely, this is a bridge he finds it very difficult to think that he might be burning. “Sorry. I mean - I shouldn’t have gone off on one. I know you were just trying to help.”

“No, you shouldn't - I mean, you don’t have to be sorry,” Gus says, grimacing. He pushes his hands further into his pockets, hunching his shoulders. “You’re right, I – I misspoke. I shouldn't have put it like that. I mean, know I won’t – _get_ – exactly what it’s like for you - I understand that it’s different, Jack, of course I do. I know that in a lot of ways it _is_ a lot easier for me. But I’m not trying to trivialise your experiences, or ask you to feel sorry for me. I just wanted to say that I have my own – pressures. And maybe they’re lighter than yours, but please trust me when I say I understand what it’s like to have to try and bear the weight of this place, even just a little.”

He lets out a long breath.

“And I get that you don’t want to talk about it,” he says, sincerely. “I mean, you can if you want, but I’m not here to make you. All I want is for you to know that you don’t have to bear it alone. It helps, to have other people around. That’s what the others have done for me. So please, come and have a drink with us.”

When Gus finishes speaking, he’s gazing at Jack and his expression is both determined and earnest. Looking back at him, Jack thinks he has never had anybody apologise so thoroughly to him without saying the word sorry before, and he’s certainly never had anybody be so insistent on figuring out exactly how he’s feeling, on making sure he’s ok. It’s – a lot to experience, but most of it’s good, he thinks. There’s something warm and bright and strong building up in his chest that he can’t really put a name to.

Gus is still looking at him, and Jack drops his eyes, flushed for no reason he can tell. Even if Gus doesn't really get it, he thinks, it can be enough that he's trying.

“Ok,” he says. “Ok.”

Gus smiles, softly, and picks Jack’s coat up off the floor.

* * *

Jack is quiet the whole way to their usual pub, walking two steps behind Gus and Hugo with his hands in his pockets. It’s not that he’s still mad, at all – that flash of anger had gone as fast as it had come – but more that Gus, in truth, had given him a lot to think about. And if he’s being completely honest, he’s still a little tired and on edge from the whole week.

Once, about ten minutes into their silent walk, Hugo seems like he’s going to push the issue, but when he turns around and opens his mouth Gus gives him a little shove and he seems to change his mind.

Teddy, unfortunately, has no such compunctions, especially since he appears to be about four drinks in by the time they arrive. He also seems to be the only one immune to Gus’ good-natured if heavy-handed brand of suggestions, which is unfortunate, because from the moment that they join Teddy and Algie, Gus had been heavily hinting that Jack isn’t really in a mood to be toyed with. Teddy, because he is just like that, seems to enjoy taking things like this as a personal challenge.

“Miller! Haven’t seen you in a while,” he says, leaning on the table. “We were beginning to think you’d jumped ship for mountaineering. They do have better lunch-time conversation than we do, I will admit. What brought you crawling back to us?”

“Wasn’t your ugly face,” Jack offers immediately, in a friendly tone.

“Alas, so it seems our beloved Miller has even less patience than usual for our light-hearted japes,” says Teddy wistfully, holding a hand against his forehead. “A sore wound indeed it is to be rebuffed by one so dear. Tell me, young Miller – what cares lie so heavily upon your poor heart?”

He looks so stupid that despite himself, Jack laughs.

“Oh, shut up,” he says, relaxing. “It’s fine, honestly.”

Teddy drops backwards onto the chair next to him, arms folded over the backrest.

“Don’t be like that. Tell Uncle Teddy,” he says encouragingly. Behind him, Algie rolls his eyes and pretends to vomit.

“Honestly, it’s ok,” Jack says, and then, because there's no way he's going to talk about his conversation with Gus, but Teddy is almost impossible to put off when he’s drunk, he says, “It’s just… uh, flatmate issues. I think I’m going to have to find another room, but it’s ok. It’s just a pain in the middle of term.”

Teddy raises his eyebrows.

“Hugo…” he says in a sing-song voice, and he reaches over to elbow Hugo in the side. “Miller’s looking for a room… how about the one next to the kitchen?”

Hugo twists around so fast he slops his beer over the table.

“You are? You should move in with us!” he says. The words come out so easily, as if he isn’t offering the kind of evidence of a friendship Jack has never even let himself dream about having. “Just think about it! We’ve got a spare space on our floor, and all the rest of us are along here – Gus, Teddy and Algie too. God, Jack, it would be great! All of us together! You could be around when we’re doing Lord of the Rings marathons, planning training sessions, helping us help Algie to learn how to do squeezes and not… be a big girl’s blouse…”

Algie, with a drunken ferocity, promptly tackles him in the ribs and together they hit the table. The ensuing aftermath of chaos saves Jack, who is struggling to balance his twin bursts of panic and happiness with every other emotion he's not dealt with this week, from having to make any kind of reply.

It’s not until the next pub along that Gus, looking pained, gently touches his elbow. The others are engrossed in discussing Hugo’s next PPE assignment.

“Jack,” he says softly, “I’m loath to start anything up again, but I just wanted to say that think it would be good for the others if you did think about moving in with us. I really, truly don’t want to overstep again, and I know-“ he says, and he holds up a hand as if to forestall an argument that Jack has no intention of making, “- I know that you’re a very private and independent person, and that’s what we all - um, we all like about you. And for God’s sake none of us want to encroach on your boundaries. We could talk about it before you moved in, if you liked. Make sure you had enough of your own space. And I’ll try and get Teddy off your case about working. But speaking selfishly, I – we would all be happy, if you would just consider it?”

Between this little speech and their conversation earlier in the evening, Jack is perhaps more touched than he has ever been in his entire life. But there’s no convenient scuffle to save Jack from having to make a reply this time so he nods, avoiding Gus’ eyes. Gus touches him briefly on the hand and then withdraws just as fast.

They don’t mention it again and he doesn’t tell the others, but he files a request with the porter’s lodge the next day.

By the end of the week, he’s carefully shifting his stuff up three flights of stairs – a box of clothes, a box of books, his bedding and a bag of personal affects - and it doesn’t take more than two trips until it’s all sitting, heaped up, outside the door of his new flat. Carefully, he wipes his now-sweaty hands on his trouser legs and gently knocks.

When Gus opens the door, the look of surprise and delight that sweeps across his face is so sincere and so genuine and so sweet, it catches him off guard enough that Jack finally lets himself feel it, blossoming up from the bottom of his chest in an unexpected swell: happiness. The kind of happiness that's been building for weeks now, that he feels when he looks at Gus, when he’s with Gus, when he thinks about Gus. Just standing here, looking at Gus smiling back at him, he feels happy enough that he could burst.

And then, he thinks that he is well and truly fucked.

* * *

He’s fucked! And inevitably, it gets worse and worse the longer he’s lived in the flat: now Gus stays up nights with him sometimes after everyone else is asleep or out, the two of them working quietly together in the flat’s tiny lounge. Sometimes they chat – Gus says it’s easier to work through something he doesn’t understand when he can teach it to someone else, and Jack quickly picks up the habit of working through a difficult problem out loud, Gus setting aside his laptop to listen to Jack expound on Biot-Savart law and the Lorentz transformation. Sometimes it doesn’t work; sometimes they lose track of whatever it was they were supposed to be talking about and move on to something completely different.

By some unspoken agreement, there are topics that they don’t discuss: Gus never talks about his family and Jack is all too keen to follow suit, they both diplomatically avoid all talk of income or class, and Gus will not discuss what he does on the days that he doesn’t leave his room. Jack doesn’t push it. He understands that there are some things too big, too raw, or too ungraspable to put into words.

But almost everything else: courses, futures, caving, their old cities, their flatmates, their favourite books and hobbies and music and food. Sometimes Jack feels like he’s discovering himself as the words tumble out of his mouth. He’s never had anybody to talk to so widely before; maybe never had someone else to think he was worth listening to. And he’s never discovered someone else quite so thoroughly.

He finds it both enormous and terrifying, how far he’s come over just the past two months. Gus once spends two hours once dissecting the concept of geo-surveillance and spatial privacy and Jack is struck by the thought that in that first car ride, when Gus had told him what he was reading, he’d assumed that Geography was something he could never be interested in without even thinking about it. But when he hears and sees Gus talk about it – waving his hands around, stabbing the air with his pencil just to makes a point, answering Jack’s clumsy questions with real, unfeigned enthusiasm – it comes alive for him in a way that Jack can _feel_. How shallow he was. How far he’s come.

And it’s not just Gus, it’s Hugo and Teddy and Algie too. Hugo joins them on rare evenings when he’s got enough work to do that he needs the pressure of others to get it done, and most of the time they try very hard to stick to it, with varying levels of success. Sometimes Teddy will drag all of them out to local pubs, but despite his best efforts both Algie and Jack are vehemently opposed to trying karaoke or open-mic performances. Jack comes to love the special kind of bond that they share on those evenings, teaming up to systematically and categorically refuse every time Teddy suggests that they sing.

Algie’s a med student so his hours are even worse than the rest of theirs, and often Jack feels guilty that he never seems to connect as well to Algie as he has to the others: it’s probably the lack of time they spend together, he thinks, or it might just be a personality thing. But he likes those rare moments of sitting back with Algie in a booth and watching Teddy absolutely butcher his way through a host of songs he’s never heard of, likes cheering Hugo’s surprisingly deep and tuneful baritone and Gus’ absolutely horrendous taste in nineties boy bands – which, tragically, does nothing at all to quash Jack’s unwanted and unasked-for feelings. He does his best not to think about it.

And there are cooking nights and college events and movie marathons and games sessions where, invariably, Jack doesn’t quite manage to pick up the rules until the very end of the night and then they never play it again – but Gus, without fail, is even worse at it than him, so he doesn’t mind. And caving weekends – once to south Wales again, twice to the Mendips, once to Yorkshire, where he learns how to squeeze and what a choke is and once acquiesces to being lowered gently down a tall ravine by rope, eyes closed and hands shaking until he reaches the shallow river at the bottom.

It’s still tough, sometimes. There are days when Jack is terrified of all the time he’s been wasting hanging out and playing games and drinking, and whole weekends of messing around underground when he could have been working, and he disappears into his room for a whole day or two to try and bury himself in books before Gus will gently come tapping his knuckles at Jack’s doorpost. Jack tries – truly, he tries – and mostly succeeds to be grateful rather than irritated at Gus’ interventions, especially because he gets the feeling that if he says the word, Gus will stop and never do it again. And after a month, he’s willing to admit to himself that it is genuinely helpful. Once or twice he even remembers the way that Gus had talked about expectations, and wonders if it would ever be useful to Gus for Jack to help him the same way.

The first time he shows up in Gus’ doorway after Gus has been out of sight for over a day, he’s nervous. He’s never asked what Gus does on the days when he’s not around the others or why he does it, and he’s terrified that he’s overstepping some unspoken boundary and Gus will never speak to him again. But when he raps on the door with his knuckles and Gus opens it, he gives Jack a very small, very tired, heartbreakingly thankful smile before quietly shadowing him to the kitchen to join in the others where they’re hate-watching The Hobbit.

Jack spends the rest of the night watching him, relieved, as he slowly regains his usual exuberance. He decides he’s not going to ask him why the lights were off when he’d opened the door, or why Gus was still wearing the same clothes from the day before. He’ll leave it to Gus, he thinks, if he ever wants to talk about it.

* * *

When the break rolls around, so does Teddy’s birthday. It’s on the last day of term and none of them are staying over the holiday: Teddy and Hugo both are heading overseas to ski for what they’re calling the ‘vac’ – if held at gunpoint, Jack would still refuse to call it that – while the other two are going home. And no matter how much he tries, Jack can’t shake the idea of how nice it would be for Teddy to have a birthday party before they all split up for the season, even just a little one, especially after Teddy had insisted on making sure they celebrated Hanukkah together.

He’d quietly observed Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur at temple by himself earlier in the term, but his cringing response to Teddy’s abominable ‘I Love You a Latke’ shirt on the first day of Hanukkah was obvious enough that Teddy, delighting in his discomfort, had insisted that they clingfilm the fire alarm, light the menorah together and try to cook latkes and sufganiyot in their tiny excuse for a kitchen, while Hugo filched obscene amounts of jam and Gus loomed in the background, visibly straining with the effort of trying not to ask a million questions. And it was nice. Good, actually. The first Hanukkah Jack had spent with other people in more time than he really cares to think about, and although it wasn’t the same as celebrating it with his family, it can be different and still be good, he thinks. At least, he’s grateful to Teddy for making him do it, grateful enough that he wants to do something in return. And Teddy doesn’t even have to know he’s involved. He can blame it all on Hugo.

It’s a small thing in the end. Hugo, who of course is friendly with all of Teddy’s course friends, invites a few people from his class over, and they skip their last afternoon of classes to spend a few hours inflating terrible Poundland balloons and hanging streamers and arguing about what music to put on and what games to play while Teddy’s out at tutorials. Gus disappears in search of a kitchen big enough to cook an actual birthday cake while Algie goes shopping for the drinks, as many as possible: Jack’s under no illusions about the state in which Teddy would prefer to end a party.

When Teddy walks through the door, they don’t make a big deal out of it. Hugo just shoves a drink and a slice of cake into his hands (M&S Victoria sponge, the tragic result of Gus’ futile mission) and immediately trash-talks him into playing Mario Kart. It turns out to be a disaster for everyone except Teddy and Algie, who are neck and neck in almost every race to the point where Jack stops properly playing so he can watch them duke it out. When Algie just beats him to the post in the final race, Teddy’s resulting mock-temper tantrum is so effusive and imaginative that Hugo and one of Teddy’s course-mates are crying over each other with laughter by the end. Watching it gives Jack such a warm glow inside: he helped this to happen, for Teddy.

When Teddy gets up to fetch himself a drink, Jack follows him quietly over to the kitchen.

“Uh, Teddy?” he says, once Teddy’s made his drink. When Teddy turns around, Jack hands him a small parcel wrapped in the ugliest wrapping paper Hugo could find.

Teddy weighs it in his hand for a second, then puts his drink down and tears off the paper. Inside is a sleek headlamp and powerpack with a helmet mount; they’d spent a few hours together scouring the internet for the best model, and although the price was eye-watering, the rest of them had pledged to cover most of it.

“I hope this is the right model,” says Jack simply. He’s trying to be as casual about it as possible, but in the silence emanating from the other side of the room he can feel the others’ eyes on the back of his head. “We all pitched in.”

Teddy tilts the lamp up and looks at it. For a brief, maddening second, Jack thinks he’s checking to see if it’s the right model, until he sees the way that it’s artfully hiding from the others the fact Teddy’s mouth is pulled into a tight line. Jack immediately understands: he’s truly touched, and doesn’t know what to do about it. In more ways than he’d like to admit, he thinks he and Teddy are very similar, in that they would both rather chew glass than willingly express a sincere emotion while there are people watching.

It is in the spirit of this solidarity that Jack has acted on intuition and expressly has banned the Happy Birthday song from the premises on the grounds that having to stand and let people sing it at you and pretend to be grateful is, in his measured experience, possibly the worst thing in the world. There were violent protestations from Hugo, of course, and Jack isn’t sure that he’s not going to try for a rousing chorus at some point the evening, but at least he tried.

So he understands when Teddy doesn’t say anything, just sets the lamp down and picks up his drink. It’s enough that, passing Teddy on the way to get his own drink, Teddy purposefully bumps his shoulder into Jack’s. When Jack looks at him, Teddy gives him a jerky, deliberate nod.

“Thanks,” he says.

Jack is absolutely fine with that.

Gus, however, corners him in the darkened corridor on the way back from the bathroom an hour later. Jack, scrutinising him in the light coming in from the kitchen, thinks he’s maybe more than a few drinks in already – it’s hard to tell with Gus, whose basic state is more cheerful than the average bear can muster up sober – but when he stumbles against the wall and laughs, that’s when Jack’s sure.

“This is a nice party,” Gus says to him, brightly. “This is a lot of fun. We don’t really do this, you know, for birthdays, and _you_ didn’t have to do this, but you did. And I know Teddy won’t say it, so someone has to: this was really, really nice of you.”

Half-horrified, half-touched, Jack can see that Gus is tearing up. It kind of takes him off-guard a little, tipsy as he is, so when Gus swoops in on him and wraps him up in a hug, Jack’s shocked enough to let him.

It is maybe the nicest hug that Jack has ever had. Gus is tall and warm and strong and he hugs like he does anything else: seemingly with his whole heart. Jack takes a few seconds to relax into it and when he does, Gus gives a little hum and lays his head down lower so it’s resting on Jack’s shoulder. When he doesn’t flinch or startle away, Gus pulls him in a little tighter.

To his absolute and excruciating embarrassment, Jack finds himself trying to fight back tears. Gus is _so warm, _and Jack, perhaps slightly more drunk than he’s willing to admit to himself, is so happy to be caught up like this by someone he likes. Trusts. Admires. Cares for, stupidly, deeply, irritatingly much. He’s not going to let himself think about it any further than that.

They stand like that for maybe ninety whole seconds, Gus occasionally letting out a very quiet sigh, before Jack realises exactly how long he’s been letting Gus hug him for. He pulls back abruptly in horror.

In the dim light, he can see his own embarrassment mirrored on Gus’ face, as well as – and to his drunken mind this strikes him as gut-wrenchingly, embarrassingly intimate – the imprint from the shoulder seam of his jumper. After a second of awful silence, Gus gives him a nervous, stupid little smile, and before Jack can even think about saying anything Gus steps around him to return to the kitchen at a pace that Jack would say is approaching a run.

Jack wraps his arms around his middle – whether from embarrassment or to preserve some of Gus’ leftover warmth, he can’t tell – and stands in the darkness of the corridor for a long moment.

Stupid, _stupid, _stupid, he thinks to himself, and he pushes his knuckles against his eyes in abject frustration. He clearly wasn’t thinking straight, and you just _stood there_ _–_

There’s a crash from the kitchen end of the corridor that makes him jump just about out of his skin. Turning, hand on his heart, he sees Teddy grinning foolishly at him with his fist against the door where he’s clearly just slammed it.

“No moping on my birthday,” he warns Jack drunkenly. “You’re always doing that. Come lose to me at Mario Kart instead.”

Jack swallows, hard.

“Alright,’ he says heavily, and follows Teddy back into the kitchen.


	3. Chapter 3

The Christmas holiday itself turns out to be fairly awful and boring, but every Christmas holiday is fairly awful and boring, so in the end it doesn’t bother him too much. But he thinks the others are a little worried about him. From the moment they leave, pretty much all of them blow up his phone: Hugo does so especially on Christmas day, despite knowing that Jack doesn’t celebrate, which Jack finds equal parts irritating and sweet. And even Gus – who left for his parents’ house the day after Teddy’s party at the same time as the rest of them dispersed, without really looking Jack in the eye – texts him every day.

In truth, Jack had spent a lot of time trying not to think about Teddy’s party, but he will admit that there was a part of him terrified that Gus was never going to speak to him again, even if he can’t put his finger on exactly what had happened. Opening up his phone the day after Gus left to see his usual barrage of exclamation points about how much Gus loves the trees back in Somerset is relieving on a scale that Jack can’t really quantify.

It’s nice, to know that they’re all still thinking about him – even if he could do without Teddy’s constant selfies in snow gear, which _all_ look the same, given that he’s covered from head to toe – and he does his best to text back and make his life seem a lot more exciting than it is, which is mostly hitting up the library for books, reading in his room and taking walks around Oxford. Part of him is a little thankful for the quiet so he can get some proper work done and spend some peaceful time by himself without any interruptions, but the novelty of being by himself again wears off far faster than Jack expected it to.

So when Gus texts from outside the flat the first week in January to say he’s back, Jack slams the front door open harder than necessary in his haste to say let him in. He’s maybe a little too paranoid about keeping his distance physically as he says hello, but Gus is smiling at him so big and so wide, pink-cheeked from the cold, that he can’t help relaxing and letting a smile of his own spread over his face. And then they settle down in the kitchen with tea to talk about Gus’ holiday, and what the college is like for Jack without students and how much work they’ve both been doing, and the sheer relief of it being like it’s always been makes Jack light-headed.

The others return in dribs and drabs – Algie appears in the kitchen one morning, nursing his usual earl grey, and Teddy gives them a running text-update of his journey back to college all the way from the station, and finally Hugo slams open the door partway through a stirring Les Mis performance mid-afternoon one day, scaring the shit out of Jack.

And then it’s back to their usual lives. Jack will never, ever admit it to them, but it’s only now the flat is full again that he realises how much he missed them: having them all back feels like he’s soothing a physical ache.

That is, until Hugo starts talking about caving again. It’s not that Jack isn’t excited to get back underground – of course he is – it’s just that Hugo’s making a lot of noise about starting some more difficult, vertical caves, and Jack isn’t really sure how to feel about that. By February, once they’re firmly settled into the new term, Hugo’s lurid descriptions of climbs and descents and cliffs and the constant barrage of information he’s spewing at Jack in his excitement are beginning to make Jack feel a little overwhelmed.

“SRT!” Hugo sings, to the tune of Let it Be, “SRT! SRT! Two points of connection, SRT! That’s single-rope training, Jack, my friend! Don’t forget, when you’re on the ropes and 40 metres about the ground, you need to pay attention when you reach the top. Make sure you’re clipping your cows tails either side of the Y-hang, so you’re spreading the load equally and you’ve got more chance of survival if one of the bolts fails.”

Jack nods, acutely aware that he has no idea what Hugo is talking about, as Algie snorts through a mouthful of tea. They’re in the common room of their flat; Hugo is sprawled out over on the old sofa where he’s managed to take up both Jack and Gus’ laps, while Algie and Teddy are drinking at the tiny kitchen table and flicking through their textbooks.

“He does this every year,” Teddy says, and starts conducting his own sentences with his spoon. “The famed Europe trip! How amazing the drops are! How fabulous the landscape! How completely unlikely the chance of us ever getting organised enough to do it! Or even train for it again!”

Hugo is supposedly engrossed in what looks to Jack like an almost comically large survey map, but he manages to pull his attention away long enough to shake his head in Teddy’s direction.

“This year, it’s going to be different,” he says wickedly, tapping his nose. “I have a secret. I know something you don’t know. I have plans you are not aware of. Even now, things that you cannot yet comprehend are falling into place, all in service of getting us closer to beautiful, vertical Europe. And when I finally let you in on my glorious plan, you will give me the respect I’ve always deserved and never gotten from you ungrateful lot.”

“Oh, is it Eriksson? Is that what he’s doing in town?” says Gus mildly, shifting slightly. Jack can feel their legs pressing a long line together from knee to hip: he’d settled down a respectable distance away, but Hugo throwing himself over them had pushed them together and now he is irritatingly and unendingly aware of all the places where their legs are touching.

Hugo visibly droops.

“How did you know?” he says, after at least five seconds.

Gus sucks in a breath. “You wrote it on your calendar, on your hand, and on Tuesday you answered a phone call and walked out of the room saying “Hello Eriksson”,” he points out carefully.

Hugo is spluttering.

“Who is Eriksson?” asks Jack, throwing him a bone.

“Our key to unlocking Europe,” Hugo says, recovering. “He’s a friend of a friend of a caving graduate who’s still caving. Loads of experience. He drops by every now and then to go out drinking with us and give us helpful tips. But, as Teddy has so helpfully pointed out, we may not have been in a position to truly appreciate his wealth of experience before. He’s trained us up on SRT before – that’s what we use in the deep caves to climb up and down – but we’ve never really used it, except in Yorkshire. Except, he’s promised to take us around Norway this year! He wants some fresh, keen faces for mine exploration! Our time is at hand!”

Teddy snorts again. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

But despite Teddy’s ongoing scepticism, plans slowly begin to move into gear. Jack meets Eriksson a couple of times over the next month or two: a friendly older man with the strongest Scandinavian accent he’s ever heard. Eriksson does seem genuinely enthusiastic about what he calls ‘encouraging caving amongst the younger yeneration’, but he’s also surprisingly grounded and mature, an anomaly amongst all the cavers he’s met so far – although Jack’s willing to admit that his pool of experience is rather small. Despite his natural caution and Eriksson’s overly-big, overly-fluffy husky, on the whole Eriksson is reassuring enough that Jack stops thinking of tactful ways to drop out of skipping off to a different country on the advice of a stranger and starts, cautiously, looking forward to it.

Teddy, in a move that he would likely consider endlessly thoughtful but that Jack considers largely irritating, has dropped a sparse number of tactful hints about costs involved and bargained Hugo down to a budget airline and a local caving hut that Eriksson has suggested, under the guise of ‘being thoughtful to all of us’, and, slightly more insultingly, a ‘rustic experience’. Jack, annoyed and well aware that he is the only one of them out of the ‘all of us’ that needs thinking about where money is involved, swears off the whole plan again for maybe two or three days before Gus’ and Teddy’s disappointed eyes following him from room to room begin to grate on him so badly that he maybe, possibly intimates that he wouldn’t be totally adverse to coming.

Truth be told, he’s a little relieved to be pressured into accepting the opportunity. As grating as it is to feel like Teddy’s pity is responsible, the idea of an overseas trip that is within his minuscule budget isn’t something he knows he’ll ever have the chance to do again, much less with people whose company he thinks he genuinely, truly enjoys.

Between Oxford and Norway, however, stands the heights training.

Since Treasurer’s Fall, Jack has been dreading this more than any other part of training. But he is who he is, which is to say more stubborn than is perhaps always good for him, so the idea of backing off and never doing this part of caving isn’t really an option for him – if the others can do it, he reasons, there’s nothing stopping him. Additionally – and he knows, he _knows, _how stupid this is – Gus lights up every time they mention SRT, and the idea of hearing Gus talk about something else he loves is too tantalising for Jack to pass up. So when Gus suggests rigging up a tree in a park on the outskirts of town and getting in some basic practise, Jack ignores the pit that opens up at the bottom of his stomach and says yes.

It goes worse than he could possibly have imagined.

The whole time they’re training and preparing on the ground, Jack spends sneaking glances up at the rigged-up tree. Gus has flung a rope over one of the boughs about 30 feet up with a kind of slingshot gadget that Jack would have been fascinated to watch if he wasn’t so busy being filled with dread, and then he tugs up a simple knot that keeps the rope anchored to the branch. It’s just up and down, Jack thinks, watching Gus haul the rope, squeezing his own hands into fists. It’s simple. Just up and down.

When it's time to gear up, Gus has to call him three times before he can tear his eyes away.

As he helps Jack to get his gear get fixed and comfortable, Gus is close enough that Jack can feel the warmth of his skin emanating through his light jacket. At any other time, he’d find Gus’ closeness a distraction, but he is all the time aware of what's hanging over his head. He senses Gus isn’t truly comfortable either: he’s as friendly as ever, but at the same time jumpier and more serious, and he won’t meet Jack’s eyes. When he steps in close, his breathing is shallower than usual, and he spends maybe longer than necessary checking over Jack’s chest ascender to make sure that Jack’s threaded it properly.

When Jack brushes his arm accidentally, Gus starts a little and steps back. His hand shoots out as if to touch Jack’s arm before he pulls it back again.

“Sorry,” he says, and gives Jack a rueful smile, but one that’s full of his usual heart. “Just jumpy. The heights, you know.”

Jack grunts an affirmative. He doesn’t think he’s capable of forming words at the moment, and Gus seems to understand, because he just sits them both down on the roots for a while for a long explanation of climbing before unleashing Jack onto the rope.

It’s as awful as he expected. Halfway up he makes the mistake of looking down and the ground immediately starts to spiral away under his feet. When he finally reaches the top, he forgets everything that Gus had told him about how to switch equipment from his ascenders to his descender: Gus has to yell him step-by-step instructions from the ground. After that, he descends as fast as possible until Gus, alarmed, tells him to slow down or he’s going to fray the rope.

When his feet finally touch the ground, his whole body is shaking almost in waves and he can’t stop his hands from trembling long enough to unclip himself from the ropes; Gus has to step forward and do it for him. As soon as he’s free, he slumps forward into Gus’ chest and stays there, eyes closed, relishing the feeling of ground under his feet and temporarily too relieved to be ashamed. After a moment of hesitation, Gus’ arms slip around him to hold him up, almost excruciatingly gently. Jack focuses on Gus’ solid heartbeat next to his ear: faster than he was expecting, but reassuring and steady.

He thinks that they both, at the same time, remember the hug from Teddy’s birthday party. At least, Gus is already jerking back by the time that Jack’s pulled himself together enough to remember himself and stand up straight. Gus coughs and turns away, busying himself with the kit bag. His cheeks burning, Jack divests himself of the harness as fast as he possibly can. He notes with a shame that’s almost physically painful that Gus seems to be taking special care not to brush his hands as they fold the rest of the kit into the bag together.

The whole walk home is excruciating. Not for Gus, who seems almost more hyperactive and cheerful than usual, bouncing from topic to topic like he can’t burn through the conversation fast enough, but Jack can’t think of what to say in response: half of him is stuck up in the tree, checking points of connection over and over, dangling so high above the ground, and the other half is still stuffing ropes into the kit bag, watching Gus snatch his hands back from Jack’s like they’d been burned.

They part to their own rooms at the flat with what seems to Jack like mutual relief and he doesn’t leave his room for maybe 18 whole hours.

When he does, Gus from the sofa turns the same smile as he’s always done on him – maybe a little self-conscious, a little chagrined, but as warm and as welcoming as ever. And maybe Jack’s answering smile doesn’t last as long as it always does, but it’s there.

Perversely, the whole experience makes Jack even more stubbornly determined to master his fear of heights. They go out to the tree a few more times with Hugo and Teddy, who turns out to be a surprisingly decent teacher and Jack gets – if not comfortable, at least competent at climbing up and down the rope. He finds the trick is to break it down into steps so small that he doesn’t have to think about the bigger picture. Pull the rope through the hand jammer. Stand up on the footloop. Pull the rope through the chest ascender. Repeat. Don’t look down.

In fact, all the preparations are going surprisingly smoothly until Teddy breaks his leg climbing back over the college wall after curfew. It’s only a minor fracture, and they’re far enough away from the Norway trip that Teddy’s mostly sure that he’ll be ready in time, but it still fills Jack with nervousness for no reason he can really quantify.

“It was my fault,” Teddy jokes, face still pale and drained, when he limps back through the door on crutches. “Couldn’t let Hugo actually plan a Europe trip. What jokes would we make about him then? Hugo’s not allowed to be organised.”

They have a caving trip planned to Yorkshire in less than a month. Gus had, with his usual, predictable excitement, gone into a detailed explanation of how the caves in the north are far more vertical than the ones in the south and how and why and what kinds of rocks and formations they’ll be seeing, but the long and short of it is it’s kind of a proving ground for Jack before Norway, to see if he can really hack it. He has, in his usual, predictable way, been both excited for it and dreading it, and he feels an unpleasant mixture of guilt and happiness in thinking about how Teddy’s broken leg has kind of thrown a wrench in these plans.

But Teddy, with more stoicism than expected, has waved off the idea of cancelling Yorkshire in favour of him just staying behind. To be honest, he doesn’t really seem bothered at all by it, but Jack’s watched him sail up and down the tree without even breaking a sweat so he supposes Teddy doesn’t really need the practise.

There’s just something about it that puts Jack on guard. He’s nervous enough about all parts of the Norway trip – the travel, the caves, the heights – that although he’s excited, it’s tempered with such a desperate need for it all to go smoothly that so deep in him that he doesn’t even realise he’s feeling until he’s watching Teddy limp back through the door. And although he berates himself for being superstitious, he can’t shake the feeling that Teddy’s broken leg is a kind of omen, and he doesn’t want to think about what that might mean for the trip.

* * *

Two weeks before Yorkshire, Hugo gets a phone call.

They’re all sitting on the sofa with Teddy’s Netflix account up on their shitty flat TV, arguing about whether or not Black Mirror is overrated, when Hugo's phone starts buzzing on the table in front of him. He's still midway through trying to convince Jack that it’s all style and no substance when he slides to connect and holds it up to his ear.

“Hello, Mother,” he says cheerily, and then he goes completely silent. Jack watches his face close like a steel trap. With a sinking feeling that gets worse by the second, he watches Hugo listen: he can’t hear what’s happening on the other end of the phone, but Hugo’s tensing up by degrees: and then after about ten seconds he chokes and claps a hand to his mouth.

“Dad?” he says, once, high and quiet, and Jack feels a deeply, awfully familiar pit in his chest open up again. With an understanding deeper than words, he knows what has happened, and he thinks the others do too: they are all completely silent as Hugo listens to the other end of the line, taking quiet, measured breaths. Gus has slid over to rest his shoulder on Teddy’s, and Algie’s looking at his hands where he’s playing with the TV remote on the arm of the sofa. Jack, for his part, is sitting very quiet and very still and trying not to think about anything at all.

Eventually, Hugo looks towards the ceiling and takes a deep breath. The voice on the other end drops off.

“I understand. I'll speak to you soon. Please call me when you know the - uh," he pauses, and takes a breath, and looks upwards, "arrangements. Please - please tell the others I love them. Goodbye."

After he hangs up, he drops the phone from his ear to settle limply on his knee.

Even as he does so, Gus is already drawing in a breath to speak. Because Jack knows him, Jack can tell how this is going to go, just from one glimpse of Gus’ round, devastated eyes: Gus is a talker. He is going to talk to Hugo and tell him how sorry he is and how they are all there for him, and he’ll ask Hugo how he’s feeling and expect a response.

And Jack knows – oh, does he know – the tidal wave of grief that Hugo is only just touching the shores of now, how completely unprepared he is to try to handle anyone else’s feelings at that moment, and he knows he has to put a stop to this before it starts. Especially when he sees Hugo reacting to Gus’ intake of breath – the deadening of his eyes, the lifting of his shoulders, like he’s preparing for something he’s not sure he has the capacity to weather.

“Out,” Jack says firmly, rising and grabbing Gus by the arm and Algie by another and towing them in the direction of the corridor. Algie shakes him off quickly, but he still walks ahead of Jack to the kitchen door, casting agonised glances back at Hugo.

Teddy doesn’t move. He’s still crouched on the sofa, looking at Hugo, but Hugo is staring at his hands and won’t catch his eye.

“Hugh…” says Teddy, quietly. “God, old friend, I’m so sorry.”

Hugo doesn’t react, or look at him, or do anything at all.

“Teddy,” says Jack quietly. He makes a small beckoning motion. “Please.”

Teddy shoots him a vicious glare, and stays on the sofa for maybe another ten seconds before he seems to accept that he’s not going to get a response. Stiffly, he unfolds from the sofa and follows Jack to the kitchen door, but he doesn’t take his eyes off Hugo once.

When they’re all in the corridor, Teddy rounds on him.

“What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?” he hisses – quietly, so it doesn’t reach Hugo where he’s still frozen to the sofa. “I’m not just going to leave him alone in there. I’m his_ best friend, _I’m not just going to –“

“I’m not leaving him alone,” Jack breaks across him. His voice is perfectly calm and measured. “I’m going to sit with him. When he’s ready, I will text you. Maybe you could take the others for a drink?”

Something about Jack’s tone seems to resonate with him, because his shoulders drop and he looks at Jack like he’s seeing something new. Algie and Gus, clustered behind him, don’t say anything. They’re both drawn and pale, Algie’s freckles standing out more than ever against his milk-white skin.

“Are you sure?” Teddy says – not accusing this time, just searching.

“Trust me,” Jack says. He tries very hard to keep the bitterness from his voice. Then he steps inside and gently but firmly shuts the door on them.

The silence inside the room is appalling. Jack walks calmly back across to the sofa, and sits right next to Hugo. Gently, he folds an arm around Hugo’s shoulders and pulls him over to rest on his own shoulder. Hugo doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything. He’s still staring at the phone in his hand. Then –

“Thank – thank you,” he says, hoarsely, and then he leans into Jack and begins to cry.

Jack lets him. They sit like that for a long time, Jack very carefully thinking of nothing at all while Hugo soaks the shoulder of his shirt, until eventually, Hugo stops shaking quite so badly and begins to take deep, steadying breaths again.

After a little while, Jack decides he’s got something he’d like to say.

“My mum was a florist,” he starts conversationally. Hugo doesn’t say anything, but after a moment, he readjusts himself on Jack’s shoulder like he’s settling in to listen.

“And my dad was a software developer. They both used to bike to work every day and they’d cross paths in the same junction in town. And one day my dad fell off at a red light and my mum stopped to help him and, you know… that was it.

“They had a while together, actually. Almost thirteen years. More than a lot of people get. She passed away when I was eight, and my dad was never the same after that. And then he lost his job like half the country in 2008 and… well, he got some work on and off for a couple of years but it never really felt like he was all there. Like being let go just finished the job that losing my mum started. And I lost him a few years later.”

Jack lets out a breath that's far shakier than he intended.

“When I lost my dad,” he says, “I didn’t have anyone. No family. But I was seventeen, almost eighteen, so I became legally emancipated and just worked for a few years before I applied here. And those years I had nothing. No-one. No family, no friends, and then I met you guys.

“And since then, you all… you became my family,’ he says. By now, his eyes are burning and he’s so pleased that Hugo’s pressed against his shoulder and can’t see his face. It makes saying what needs to be said so much easier. “And I want you to know that I would do anything for any of you, anything at all. And over the next few months, you need to know that all of us are here for you. You can lean on us. Like I did. So you never have to feel like you’re alone in this. And one day down the line, maybe you can tell me all about your dad. Who he was. Stuff like that.”

“Thank you,” says Hugo after a minute. He’s crying again, but more softly this time, more controlled. “I’d like that.”

When the others pour in through the door after about six hours, Hugo is still pale and shaky, but he and Jack have been chatting long enough over tea – nothing important, just whatever inconsequential nonsense that comes to mind – that he’s collected enough to say hello and accept a hug from everyone before heading quietly off to bed. As he leaves, he gives Jack a private, tremulous little smile.

Jack watches him go, twisting his fists in his jumper and just hopes – prays – that he’d said and done the right thing.

* * *

Over the coming days, he watches as Hugo gradually regains his life and colour. There is one terrible weekend where he goes to London for the funeral - when he gets back, he finally takes Jack up on his offer to tell Jack about his father and they spend a whole night getting absolutely and horrendously shit-faced, all of five them leaning on each other and most of them telling stupid stories of parents and childhood and family - but apart from that, they all tend to stick to their usual routine just for something to hold onto while Hugo's weathering the storm.

And between Gus' heavy but well-meaning sympathy, Algie's practical assistance, Jack's silent support and Teddy's refusal to treat Hugo any differently, he kind of blossoms back into a version of himself where he's just a little quieter and a little wilder than he used to be, all at the same time. It's intimately familiar to Jack. He knows what it's like to lose a parent you love, to never really be able to find your way back exactly to the person you were before - but of all the ways that Hugo could be, it's the best he thinks could hope for.

To be honest, Jack's mostly lost his superstitious nervousness about the Norway trip in the whole business of trying to make sure as best he can that Hugo's going to be okay. It feels childish, almost, the idea that the bad things that have been happening to them are anything other than the kind of sheer dumb bad luck that Jack has been unfortunate enough to sample extensively several times in his life. He tells himself, firmly, that it's stupid. 

So when he comes back mid-afternoon ten days later to a completely silent flat, the horrible, ominous feeling it gives him is like a punch in the gut. There’s nothing unusual about their flat being quiet in and of itself, because they’re all busy students and most of them are out more often than they're in during the day, but all the lights are on and there’s still no noise. Something about the flat like this feels – on edge. Stifled. He’s reminded of the silence they’d all held during Hugo’s phone call. It’s not a good thought.

Nervously, Jack makes his way through to the lounge.

When he walks through the door, Teddy, Hugo and Algie are all sat on the sofa. Algie, for once, has an arm around one of the other boys; a surprise to Jack, who has often thought that Algie’s the only one who’s more touch-averse than he himself is.

They all look up when he enters and Jack immediately knows that something is definitely wrong when he notices how red Hugo’s eyes are.

He drops his backpack with a thud.

“What is it?” he says, and it’s only then that he does the mental maths on the room’s occupants. Three of them. Three and the corner of the sofa where Gus usually curls up when they do their work, which is gapingly, obviously empty.

Jack feels like he might have blacked out for a second. In a low, leaden voice he says, “Where is he?”

“Don’t panic,” Hugo says placatingly as he gets up, which is the stupidest thing Jack thinks he possibly could have said. There is no phrase in the English language more perfectly engineered to make someone panic. “He’s going to be ok.”

Jack grips the edge of a counter and tries very hard not to think. “But he’s not now?”

He doesn’t want to be doing it, but of course he is: thinking of his mother. His father. Except that he’s not, because he never really does, because the grief is still so close and so raw that he can’t think directly about it, like trying to look at the sun: too big and too bright to conceive of, impossible to look straight at for more than a few seconds. And it _hurts._

When he blinks, Hugo is in front of him, steadily holding him by the arms. He looks Jack dead in the eyes, forcing him not to look away. Jack feels stupid and guilty, for panicking so much and so obviously when Hugo’s still so recently grappling with his own loss.

“Listen to me,” Hugo says, and although his voice is raspy it’s strong. “He’s fine. It’s just appendicitis. They caught it before it got bad and he’s in surgery now. He’s not in any danger. Jack, he’s _fine, _trust me.”

As it sinks in, Jack nods. “Thanks – thank you,” he says, embarrassed at how scratchy his own voice is.

Hugo pulls him in for a close hug and Jack returns it, for once – a real, proper hug, with Hugo gently slapping him on the back. It lasts for all of five seconds before the rest of him catches up to the part that needs to be where Gus is, right now.

He pulls back and wipes his eyes.

“I’m going to the hospital,” he says. “If possible, I would like a lift.”

Without hesitation, Hugo says, “Let me get my coat.”

In the end, all of them except for Algie, who has a shadow shift in the training hospital and is bitterly apologetic, end up sitting in the waiting room for about five hours to see Gus while he wakes up from surgery. Jack is on the edge of his seat the whole time. He hates hospitals _so_ much: how bright they are, how busy they are, how sick that clinical disinfectant smell makes him feel. Hugo keeps an arm around his waist from the moment they walk through the door and Jack is shamefully and completely grateful.

When the nurse comes out to tell them he’s ready, all three of them bolt to their feet.

As they leave, Jack looks around him at the rest of the waiting room and wonders or the first time since setting foot into the hospital exactly where Gus’ family is: when he’d been coming into the hospital over that awful, terrible year before his mother passed, there had always been someone with him, his father or his grandfather or his aunt. But there’s nobody here apart from the three of them.

For a minute, he thinks about asking the others if anyone's reached out to Gus' family. But looking over at Hugo, whose lips are compressed into a tight line as he pushes through the ward doors behind the nurse, he thinks of all the times that Gus has avoided making that kind of conversation and decides, firmly, that he’s not going to ask.

When they reach Gus’ ward, he’s awake and he’s ok. He looks more embarrassed than anything else, especially when Teddy dramatically flings himself onto the bed and starts to proclaim about how worried they all were. It seems to help him, though: Jack, hanging back, watches as fending off Teddy’s increasingly stupid advances brings more and more colour to Gus’ cheeks and animation to his eyes. Maybe the only good thing Teddy being irritating has ever done, Jack thinks, and rolls his eyes. When Gus catches it, he shoots Jack a sweet, private smile and raises his own eyebrows too, just for a second.

While Teddy and Hugo fuss over Gus with varying levels of sincerity, Jack hangs back, until Hugo turns around to look at him. When he sees Jack hovering near the door, he also gives Jack a surprisingly soft smile, then turns to Teddy.

“I’m going to get a coffee,” he says, bumping Teddy’s shoulder. “Come with?”

Gus, looking exhausted again, gives them a weak wave as they leave. When they’ve shut the door he smiles at Jack, and then lies back in bed and closes his eyes.

To tell the truth, Jack is enormously pleased at this, because it means that he can do the only thing he really wants to do right now, which is stare at Gus uninterrupted, ravenously enough that maybe at some point he’ll be able to convince himself Gus is actually ok. And he does look it, truth be told, even after putting up with Hugo and Teddy. He’s still paler than usual, maybe, but his face is smooth and untroubled and he really does look like he’s just resting.

“Think it’s safe to say I have a _terrible_ feeling about this Norway trip,” Jack says lamely, half-joking, when the silence stretches on. It’s the only safe thing he can think to say. “I think it’s cursed. I’m sorry. Maybe we can try again next year?”

Gus opens his eyes and snorts, then immediately winces.

“Oh, that was a bad idea,” he says painfully, shifting. “I know the feeling, though. We haven’t exactly had a clear run-up, have we?”

Jack makes a non-committal noise, but Gus is still speaking.

“But I don’t think – honestly, I don't think we should let it stop us. I mean, between myself and Teddy, I think it’s safe to say that Yorkshire is a non-starter, but as far as I’m concerned, I am going to Norway. We’re _all _going. We’ve got plenty of time. We haven’t done all this preparation for nothing, and God, I am _not _planning to leave you to SRT in a cave alone. Or worse, trust you to _Teddy_.”

He folds his hands in his lap, weakly but primly.

“_You’re_ going,” he says, “and if I have to wheel this bed to Norway, I’m going to be at the top of any cliffs you have to climb. Cursed or not, we’ve got each other, and someone needs to check your ropes for you. It’s going to be me.”

“You can't be fucking _serious._” says Jack in return. He feels himself swelling up like a balloon with a sweet kind of frustrated disbelief and the sheer giddy reassurance that Gus is well enough for them to be having this argument. It feels good_; _the chance to direct all the emotions of the last six hours in some kind of practical, manageable direction is an inexpressible relief.

“No,” he says, poking a finger at Gus, who rolls his eyes but otherwise lets him barrel on. “I’m not having you risking your life and health to come and help me in some freezing cave because I’m too chicken to climb down – I’ll do it myself. Frankly, I can’t believe you would even suggest it. I would rather we cancelled the trip, it’s not the end of the world if we don’t go. I can’t believe you would _even – _if you _think_ – I’m not going to stand by while you –“

He’s reached the point in a confrontation where he starts to lose the ability to accurately form sentences embarrassingly quickly when Gus, almost absent-mindedly, reaches over to hold his hand where it’s lying on the bed.

“Do shut up,” he says, in a voice that’s weak but irresistibly, Englishly pleasant.

Jack closes his mouth with a speed that he hadn’t previously known he was capable of. He’s staring at Gus’ hand where it lies lightly on top of his. It’s large and pale and surprisingly warm, and Jack can feel callouses where Gus is rubbing his palm slightly over Jack’s knuckles. It is a lovely feeling. Jack can’t really express how lovely.

Until Gus follows his line of sight, and then he removes his hand instantly, flushing a delicate shade of red. He thrusts the offending limb back under the blanket like it’s distasteful. Jack is aware of the warmth creeping up his own cheeks and he stares at his own hands where he’s just shoved them into his lap.

“I’m going,” says Gus, with maybe a little bit too much finality.

“Ok,” says Jack, because he can’t think of anything else to say. Gus looks at him.

“You’re an idiot,” he says, softly.

He sounds inexpressibly, almost painfully fond, and it catches Jack right in the chest like a hammer blow: how fucking terrified Jack has been, how achingly scared, how hard he’s been trying not to think about what might have happened if it was something worse. What his life would look like without Gus in it. How it scares him maybe even more than losing Gus how fast it has all happened, when less than a year ago he didn’t even know Gus existed.

“Ok,” Jack says again, so much more quietly than he’d intended.

After a moment, they share a very small, very awkward smile.


	4. Chapter 4

Between Gus’ appendectomy and the day they’re due to fly, Jack feels endlessly on edge, as if he's constantly waiting for the next terrible thing to happen. The more days pass without incident, he thinks, the more nervous he feels.

Truth be told, it’s not until they’re safe actually on the plane – all their kit packed in bags, all their travel and accommodation booked, all the last-minute scrambling out the way – and nothing else has happened, that he feels like he can finally start to relax and get excited about what’s ahead of them, at least until they get there. To start with, the plane flight. He has never flown before, and he’s been looking forward to it almost as much as the trip itself.

After they board, it shakes out that he and Hugo are sitting next to each other – Jack in the aisle seat, Hugo at the window. Jack would never in a million years admit it, but he is absolutely crushed not to have the window seat.

Hugo doesn’t seem to have noticed, and what’s worse is that he’s not even _using _it: he’s pulled out some headphones and a book, and hasn’t glanced out of the window more than once since they got on the plane.

They spend the pre-flight checks chatting and discussing what’s waiting on the other end, but when take-off begins, Jack goes silent. He cannot tear his eyes away from the window. The view outside is unbelievable, like something from a dream. He watches the ground beneath them fall away underneath the wing, like they’re stationary and it’s the whole world that’s moving, little fields and houses becoming pinpricks becoming nothing at all. It’s like nothing he’s ever seen.

After a few minutes, the seatbelt sign above them clicks off.

“Jack, old boy,” Hugo says, a little strangled, from somewhere over his head. Jack realises, a little late, that he has leaned over so far that he’s digging an elbow into Hugo’s stomach. “Did you want the window seat?”

“No,” says Jack, embarrassed, as he pulls back into his seat, but Hugo has already begun to unbuckle his seatbelt. When Jack begins to put up an – admittedly feeble – protest, Hugo unbuckles his too, picks him up dumps him bodily onto the floor of the aisle, and settles into Jack’s aisle seat. Somewhere behind them, Jack hears an air hostess begin to hiss a stream of very polite reprimands in their direction.

Hugo, ignoring her, clips the seatbelt in while looking Jack dead in the eye. He pointedly gestures Jack to the window seat. Still on the floor, Jack is tearing up with the effort of trying to hold in his the laughter. He raises his hands in surrender.

“Ok, ok,” he says, and he gets to his feet and squeezes past Hugo to buckle himself into the window seat.

For the rest of the flight, Jack sits with his head propped in his hands, staring out the window. He watches what feels like the whole world go past underneath him.

When the sun clears the clouds to the west of them, huge and red and beautiful, the way it makes Jack feel is absolutely indescribable. He becomes aware all of a sudden that the sun is setting over lands that he will never set foot on, never see from the ground, that everywhere the light touches there are people he will never meet doing things he will never know about. Jack will admit that he is a comparatively inward-looking person, even if it is by necessity - after all, he thinks a little wryly, when it feels like you're always trying to keep yourself from drowning it can be difficult to recognise the beauty of the water - so to be so unmistakably faced with the reality of a world out there that's so much bigger than him, it’s – surprisingly humbling. Before he can stop himself, he lets out a soft, involuntary sigh.

There’s a choking sound from behind him.

When he turns around, Gus has his face buried in his hands, looking a little flushed, and Teddy’s arm is settling around his shoulders. Algie is eyeing them with some concern from the next seat over. Jack, alarmed, stops thinking about the flight for perhaps the first time in about four hours.

“Is he ok?” he mouths to Teddy, worried, when he manages to catch Teddy’s eye. “His appendix?”

Teddy looks painfully amused. “He’s fine,” he says out loud. “I don’t think it’s the appendix. I think he’s just hungry. Just really _yearning _for something. You know.”

Jack can see Gus’ face flush even redder where it’s not concealed by his fingers, and his elbow shoots out to connect directly with Teddy’s stomach. Teddy chokes and doubles over.

“Goodness, I’m s_o_ sorry,” Gus says weakly. Next to them, Algie rolls his eyes and buries himself back in his book. “Turbulence. You know.”

There are many occasions over the past six months, Jack thinks, just when he feels like he’s coming to truly get these people, that they do something that no sensible and straightforward man can understand. Prudently, he decides that this is one of those occasions, and goes back to looking out the window.

The rest of the flight is uneventful, and when they reach Tromsø airport, there’s a short stopover before their flight to Longyearbyen where they all vacillate wildly between almost hyperactively excited and earth-shatteringly exhausted in the waiting room, and then they’re back on a plane. The flight from Tromsø to Svalbard airport is completely different – in a tiny, shuddering aeroplane where Jack’s conscious, the entire time, of the sky just on the other side of the hull – and he falls in love with flying all over again. There’s nothing underneath them the whole time but the vast, iron-grey expanse of the sea and it’s absolutely mesmerising. As the sun finally sinks over the horizon, Jack spots his first iceberg looming in the dim distance and it brings up a whole mess of feelings in his chest – a strange mix of fear and excitement and dread, all at once. It feels like something’s about to start, but he can’t quite say what.

By the time they land at Svalbard, it’s snowing heavily. The flakes are coming down hard and fast, swirling away and into the darkness in flurries like Jack’s never seen before. Eriksson is waiting for them by the gate with his dog: he gives each of them a strong hug before they throw all their kit and bags in the back of his jeep.

As they leave, his dog hops into the back seat and spends the entire ride to the hut with his head in Jack’s lap. It irritates him for maybe two minutes until he discovers exactly how warm the dog is and how surprisingly soft he is to touch, and then he buries his hands in fur and starts to busy himself with petting. The dog graciously and calmly submits to his ministrations and by the time they’re pulling up to the hut complex, Jack finds himself strongly rethinking all the opinions he’d ever held about dogs.

When Eriksson catches his eye through the rear-view mirror, he gives Jack a very knowing look. Jack, flushing, still does not take his hands out of the dog’s fur until he has to leave the car.

Eriksson graciously offers to let them settle in overnight before they start thinking about caving, but Jack thinks the rest of them are as nervous and eager to get going as he is, so they all decline. While they dump all their bags in the kitchen and grab snacks and cups of coffee, Eriksson sorts out tables and chairs in the lounge room for them all. When they’re all settled, he drops a stack of maps onto the table. One in particular he unrolls carefully, propping it open with a mug and a book, and then starts tracing a route lightly with neat, precise movements.

Hugo leans in, scanning the paper intently.

‘This is the path that I would like you to take,’ Eriksson says to them all, indicating where he’s marked the entrance to a large passageway which continues far into the hill. ‘I can assure you that it is very safe. It has been mapped several times by other exploring parties but for the purposes of this expedition, we would like to ensure that the information already collected is up to date. As you can see, there are further passages here and here,’ he indicates these with a flick of the pencil, ‘that will bear further study for you young yentlemen later in the week.’

Over his shoulder, Hugo is frowning as he studies the survey.

“This looks like a straight shot through the mine,” he says, looking at the path Eriksson has marked. “Are there any pots? Cave-ins? Anything we should know about? Will we be doing any climbing or sumps?”

“There is a drop or two further in, here,” says Eriksson, indicating a few places in the map. “But nothing big and no complicated rigging. Don’t worry, you will be perfectly safe.”

Jack has a sinking feeling that perhaps Eriksson has misunderstood Hugo’s concerns: he doesn’t think it’s safety that Hugo’s worried about. He is unfortunately vindicated when Hugo leans over to tap his own pencil against the map, wearing a calm and reasonable expression that Jack is all too familiar with.

While Hugo is of course completely capable of being calm and reasonable and would probably be considered, by outsiders, the voice of reason within their group, by now Jack is entirely aware that _all_ of them, including Hugo, are capable of the kind of batshit impulse decisions that made them pick up a hobby involving crawling into holes in the ground in the first place. Hugo just gets away with it more often because most of his bad decisions are just in the pursuit of going underground, and – like Gus, to a lesser extent – he carries himself with the natural air of the eminently reasonable. The basic confidence of the unassailably wealthy, Jack thinks. Or maybe something about the jawline. And to be fair to Hugo, he reasons, it’s only sometimes that he gets carried away and starts wanting to do things like throw himself off cliffs in the dark.

The long and short of it is that Jack can tell when Hugo’s masking the air of excitement that comes with what’s probably going to be a bad decision, and he is undoubtedly doing so now. So when he points to the map and says, “What about this way?”, Jack doesn’t feel surprise as much as he feels a sense of dull, heavy apprehension.

He cranes over the table and sees where Hugo is pointing to: a passageway that splits off to the left from where Eriksson has traced the route that he wants them to take, just a few passages in from the entrance. It looks to, Jack’s unpractised eye, like it’s where the mine joins an earlier cave system: the smooth, regular passages and deep shafts of the mine are criss-crossed with a mess of wriggling tunnels that shrink to crawls and expand to full-size chambers.

“This looks a little more interesting,” says Hugo lightly. “Does the mine connect to a pre-existing system over here? That’s fine if it is – I mean, if it would help, we’d be more than happy to do a few drops and chokes. We’ve gotten all the training under our belt for it. And so many of these passages don’t have a marked ending – if we could fill some of those out, we really could be of use to you.”

Eriksson’s mouth twists very slightly, which is the closest Jack thinks he’s going to get to looking actively unimpressed.

“I do not think that is a good idea,” he says. “There have been several expeditions into that part of the system over the past few decades that… hmm… I would say they have fallen into some bad luck, yes? I do not think that you are familiar enough with the mining systems around here and you do not have enough experience with SRT. Better to leave that for later, or maybe to some of the more experienced explorers.”

Jack knows instinctively that Eriksson could not possibly have said anything to make Hugo more determined to explore those passages. He and Gus catch each other’s eyes. Gus grimaces at him as Hugo asks lightly and offhandedly, “Oh, what’s wrong with the passages? Is there a cave-in, or flooding? Perhaps the air is bad?”

“Oh no, nothing like that,” Eriksson says reassuringly, and Hugo smiles in a way that makes Jack very uneasy. He desperately wants Eriksson to stop talking. “It’s a safe mine, it just is not a physical problem. There is something just bad about that part of the system. You trust me, you leave it alone, you stay safe.”

“Of course,” says Hugo, warmly and brightly. Teddy shifts next to him and Hugo winces: Jack is sure that underneath the table, Hugo’s foot has just been swiftly and mercilessly crushed. Eriksson, already gathering up the rest of his maps, doesn’t seem to have noticed.

“Perfect,” he says, rising and tapping his maps gently against the one he’s left on the table. “I will leave this with you. Are you starting tomorrow?'

Jack finds himself nodding along with all the rest of them, as Hugo says, "Oh, a short trip at least."

"So eager," Eriksson says, laughing. "So tomorrow evening you can tell me all about your trip, and then perhaps we will discuss looking at another system next week, yes?”

When he’s gone, Hugo slides into his vacated seat to look over the map. His fingers trace over the left-hand passage.

“Hugo…” says Gus, putting a warning hand onto his shoulder.

To his credit, Hugo doesn’t even pretend he’s not considering it. “Just think about it, Gus,” he says beseechingly. “We came all this way and we’re just going to be walking around a bunch of beginner caves? Double-checking the same route people have already been over? We could have just gone back to Wales and done CDD2 for the hundredth time.”

“Eriksson probably knows what he’s talking about,” says Gus reasonably. “If there’s something wrong with those passages, there’s something wrong with them. We’ll be working in a mining system we don’t know, with a rescue team who are going underground themselves. It’s not safe.”

“Isn’t it?” Hugo asks, putting his palm on the survey map. “Did he ever actually say what was wrong with it? If it was flooded or categorically dangerous, sure! That’s fine! But just – bad feelings? That’s no reason at all! And if it was really unsafe, why would he have said that he was going to leave it for other explorers? It’s not like we have to commit to the full passage, Gus. If the worst comes to the worst, we just turn around and leave.”

Gus twists his mouth, but he doesn’t say anything, so Hugo barrels on.

“We all came here to try something new. And some of us have been looking forward to this trip for _years._ But it’s insulting, having us double-check a walk-in-the-park passage when we could be doing some actual work! We only have so much time here, and I’d like to actually _do _something. Who knows when the next time we’ll be able to come out is? We have a real opportunity here, Gus.”

“_I_ also have three new appendectomy scars perfectly positioned for harness work,” says Gus lightly, but Jack can tell he’s considering it. He turns to Jack.

“What do you think?” he asks.

Maybe Jack might have told him, honestly, but then Gus says, “do you think you’ll be ok on those descents?”, and Jack feels his stomach drop. Because that’s why Gus came out here, isn’t it, he thinks. Risked his health to make sure that Jack was going to be okay on those ropes, and what was the point of Gus coming all the way out here if Jack is going to chicken out on the very reason he came?

“I’ll be fine if you’re all there,” he says finally, and he fervently hopes that’s going to be true.

“You can say no,” says Gus, and he really does sound sincere. “This is a group decision. This goes for you too, Teddy, and you, Algie.”

Except that Teddy was never going to say no to a risky adventure – Jack knows him better than that by now – and Algie’s not going to cross a decision that all of the rest of them have made. So it doesn’t surprise him when Teddy holds his hand out to Hugo for a fist-bump, and Algie drums up a wan smile of acknowledgement.

There’s not much for them to do for the rest of the night except eat and sleep. Hugo disappears to Eriksson’s hut to hash out the route they’ll be taking to the system – it’s fairly far off, but Eriksson has scrounged up a few off-road vehicles that Hugo is eager to get his hands on – and the rest of them take the opportunity to cook up a truly disgusting mess of as much protein and carbohydrates as they can get their hands on. When he returns, they all sit around the fireplace and eat, Jack occasionally feeding the dog bits of sausage. It’s nice. Peaceful, or it would be if Jack could stop catastrophising about what’s going to happen when they get underground.

The others are all as quiet and as pensive as he is, and he wonders how many of the rest of them are having similar thoughts.

After dinner, they all seem to silently and unanimously decide to go straight to bed. The first evening of any caving weekend is usually a big piss-up for most of them – Teddy likes to boast that he’s been caving more often hungover than he has sober – but the lateness of the hour and the lingering atmosphere of Eriksson’s clear experience and maturity means that none of them are reaching for the cans that they’ve got tucked away in overnight bags. Instead, they all troop into their bunkroom, where whatever pall had been hanging over the evening seems to dissipate when confronted with the ritual of choosing beds.

As usual, Hugo and Gus each instantly settle on wanting the same bed, which leads to the same playfight they always have. As soon as Gus tackles Hugo to the ground, the rest of them drop their bags by the door and wait for it to be over.

After a minute, Jack becomes painfully aware that he is watching Hugo and Gus wrestle with a very uncomfortable look of longing on his face, and that Teddy, sitting across from him, is watching him like someone would perhaps watch a train-wreck happening: fascinated, but against his will.

Teddy gives him a look he can’t quite decipher and Jack’s cheeks start to burn.

“It’s not –“ he blurts out, very much aware that he would rather be anywhere else on earth right now, and that he has also lost the ability to formulate complete sentences in his embarrassment. He truly doesn’t even know why he is speaking right now. “I just – I don’t –“

Teddy, looking like he’s making himself part of this conversation against his better judgement, raises an eyebrow.

Jack makes the executive decision that if he’s going to have to talk about it, he’s not going to look at Teddy while he does it.

“It’s not _weird,” _he says quietly. Teddy snorts, but not unkindly, so Jack forges on. “It’s just… he seems a lot more comfortable around the rest of you than he does around me. And I don’t know why.”

When he glances over, Teddy seems like he’s fighting some kind of furious inner battle with himself. It means something that Teddy hasn’t immediately asked whether Jack is talking about Gus or Hugo, Jack thinks, but for the life of him Jack can’t say what that is.

“Listen, this is very much none of my business,” Teddy says finally, clearly pained, “and although I have several things I would _absolutely like to say, _I can’t get involved. I will just say this: you’re mad if you think that he considers you anything other than his best friend in the whole _world-"_ Jack will never, ever admit to the little thrill of happiness that runs through him when Teddy says this - "so I would invite you to think about why, if so, he’s taking so much trouble not to rough’n’tumble you like he does with the rest of us.”

Jack has, in fact, spent a lot of time trying to avoid considering that exact point. He personally cannot see any possible reasons that are going to make him feel particularly good about his own feelings for Gus and whether or not Gus has noticed them. Or how Gus might maybe be reacting to them. In fact, he decides, he’s not going to take that train of thought any further, because he’s starting to feel ill.

Perhaps Teddy senses the direction his thoughts are taking, because he frowns.

“Except,” he continues resignedly, “of course, that although you are my brother-in-caves and I love you very much and consider you a prince among physicists, you are also the densest man I have ever had the misfortune to be hopelessly fond of. I know you’re not going to think sensibly about this. In fact, I would bet good money that you’re just going to mope until the end of time, and we’re all going to have to watch you do it. So do yourself – and us – a favour and talk to him.” He stresses the last few words.

“Never in a million years,” says Jack automatically, but he is absurdly touched by Teddy’s words; the slightly sarcastic way in which he says them notwithstanding. “_We_ never even had this conversation.”

Teddy rolls his eyes.

“Useless,” he says fondly, ruffles Jack’s hair, and bounds off to claim his own bed.

Within half an hour, they’re all in bed with the lights off, Hugo having won a swift and decisive victory for the coveted bunk. Jack thinks the excitement of the day and the nervousness he feels about what might happen in the morning will keep him up until the early hours, but one second he’s watching Hugo pore Eriksson’s survey map in the dim light of his phone, and the next Gus is gently shaking him awake. He’s smiling far too brightly for how groggy and tired Jack still feels, but he does bring the news that coffee’s ready, which is all Jack really needs to hear.

Hugo also seems disgustingly cheerful for someone who's had even less sleep than the rest of them: he wolfs down his breakfast and is practically bouncing from foot to foot as they haul all their stuff over to Eriksson’s four-by-four and check supplies for the dry-drums. Jack’s keeping a list in his mind of all the stuff they need to do before they leave like a count-down – he can’t decide whether he’s more scared or excited, but with everything he ticks off he can feel the pressure of both emotions building up inside him.

And then Gus throws the last oversuit into the back of the car and they’re off.

It doesn’t take them very long to get to the site. As they all pile out and start sorting SRT kits and rope bags, Jack eyes the dilapidated mine entrance with a growing feeling of mistrust. He’s never been into a mine before: something about thinking about those rotting pit-props and deep drops fills him with a very real sense of dread.

Gus seems to catch his mood, because he elbows Jack gently in the shoulder and says lightly, “At least it’s easy walking. It’s cold, I know, and we’ve got a short-cut through a section of actual cave to avoid a cave-in, but apart from that it’s flat floor and high ceilings all the way. Won’t it be nice not to have to crawl and scramble the whole way through?”

It is, admittedly, nice, Jack thinks, after they’ve been at it for half-an-hour or so. That sense of foreboding hasn’t entirely gone away, but Jack is so used to having to stretch and shove and squeeze and bend to get through caves that being able to take a leisurely stroll is something of a luxurious novelty, even if Teddy has twice pulled him away from almost putting his foot into a hidden drop. And the existing cave passages, when they enter them to avoid the cave-in, aren’t too difficult either - the boulder choke they encounter, when it comes, isn’t as complex as some that Jack’s done, although Hugo and Algie both get a little stuck and they have to backtrack once when Hugo takes a wrong turning, and they’re back into the mining passages before long. Jack tries his best not to look at or think about the site of the cave-in as they pass it: he thinks the small glimpse he catches out of the corner of his eye, all rocks and mud and buried pit props, is going to haunt him the whole time he’s down here.

As they walk, Hugo gradually gets faster and faster in his impatience, until finally he rounds a corner and gives a relieved little laugh.

“Here we are,” he says breezily, and he slips the coil of rope off his shoulder. “Climb time.”

Standing at his shoulder and looking at it, Jack does not see what there is to laugh about. Honestly, it is – and he does not want to exaggerate here – the worst thing he has ever seen.

It’s not the size of the chamber. Jack’s been in tunnels and passages small enough that he couldn’t even manage hands and knees, where he had to crawl on his belly like a lizard – some small enough that he couldn’t even hold his head up straight. So it’s a fairly small chamber – tiny in comparison to some of the grand, echoing halls they’ve all explored, maybe the size of his regular seminar room – but that’s fine.

What’s making every hair on his body stand on end is the mineshaft.

The whole far half of the chamber is taken up by the shaft, a pit that extends all the way across from one wall to another. By and large, it’s covered by an ancient-looking wooden platform, but between the uneven, haphazard slats, Jack can see nothing but darkness. It looks, to Jack’s panicked eye, like a gentle breeze could collapse it.

As a final touch, in a square hole at the side of the platform, the top of a decaying ladder is hunched against the wall. It’s curiously menacing, Jack thinks. Like it’s been placed there, waiting for something to climb up it from the pit below.

Gus must pick up on his expression, because he gently knocks his arm against Jack’s.

“It looks a lot scarier than it is,” he says. “And before you ask, yes, we’re going down the ladder. But I swear to you, when we’ve got the ropes set up it’s completely safe. It’s actually going to be way easier with that thing there – won’t even have to climb at all if you don’t want to. Want me to walk you through it?”

Jack does not.

“Ok,” he says instead, as Teddy and Algie push past them and start busying themselves with various bits of kit.

Gus points out a handful of thick metal rings punched in a horizontal line into the right-hand wall, all about waist height. The closest to them are anchored just a few feet away, where the floor beneath is still solid rock, and the furthest hang just over the ladder. Hugo, hands full of rope, is tying some knots into the closest ones.

“Those are the bolts we tie the ropes off to, put there by cavers who’ve come before us,” Gus explains. He seems very calm: Jack isn’t sure how much of that is faked. “Hugo will rig up a belay safety rope that runs along the wall through a few bolts – and you’ll attach your harness to it, so that you can walk up to the drop without being in danger of falling into it. It’ll catch you if you slip at the edge. And those bolts over the ladder – that’s where we’ll hang the other rope, the one that we’ll use to climb down. I’ll come along behind you, and then I’ll talk you through getting onto that rope. Hugo will go first, so he’ll be at the bottom waiting for you to get down. All you have to do is climb down the ropes. I promise you, Jack, you’ll be fine.”

“Thanks,” Jack says, but something about this doesn’t seem to convince Gus, who ducks his head towards Jack so Jack can’t avoid meeting his eyes.

“I promised you,” he says to Jack, gently but firmly. “Jack, I promised you would be alright and you will be. It’s a shame that we didn’t get to make that Yorkshire trip and break you in gently. But believe me, Jack, as long as we’re here, you _will_ be safe.”

Jack forgets sometimes what it feels like, how Gus can be when he focuses all his attention on someone. He is _the_ most earnest person Jack has ever met; it can be overwhelming to feel the full force of it. Like standing under a spotlight. Jack has never truly felt seen in the way he does when Gus gets like this, like nothing else in the world exists apart from him and Gus: he truly doesn’t understand how everyone doesn’t feel the way he does for Gus, how anyone can sit under his earnest consideration and not come away just a little bit in love.

Out of the corner of his eye, he’s distracted by watching Hugo take a step onto the platform. He flinches.

“Are you sure that thing’s safe?” he says.

Gus follows his line of sight and then blows out a breath.

“Well, no,” he admits. “Any more than we’re sure that our ropes are completely safe, or whoever installed those bolts did it properly, or that the pit props down here are still secure. Part of what’s important in dealing with the more dangerous parts of caving is just living with that uncertainty. But if someone’s already been here and put in those bolts, it’s a safe bet that the platform is stable enough that we can step on it.”

“What’s left of it,” Jack mutters, but bizarrely, he does feel a little better for hearing Gus acknowledge the dangers.

In the meantime, Gus has fallen uncharacteristically quiet. He’s squinting over at Jack, looking a little nervous.

“Is your…” he says, before quickly cutting himself off. Jauntily, he gives Jack what he clearly believes is a very convincing smile. In reality, it makes him look a little nauseous.

“Let’s make a pact,” says Jack, trying to keep his panic from resurging. “When we’re down in the dark about to throw ourselves down a century-old mineshaft, let’s promise to finish any ominous questions or sentences we start, yeah?”

“Sorry,” Gus says, looking chagrined. “It’s just your headtorch is looking a bit dim. I didn’t want to worry you. But trust me, it’s fine. We’ve got a host of spare batteries in the –“

“Balfour!” Teddy calls from where he’s standing next to the ladder. Next to him, Hugo’s dropping out a complicated-looking knot into the hole, looking pensive. Jack watches the rope beneath it unspool and bounce against the steps, and feels a little sick. “Crab me up! Hugo wants to extend the belay, but he’s run out.”

“I don’t have any on me,” says Gus, checking his harness. “But we’ve got some club ones in the dry-drum, Algie’s got it.”

“Car_li_sle!” yells Teddy, “Give ‘em up! We need those crabs!”

Algie doesn’t respond. When Jack peers over to where he’s standing, he sees that Algie’s got both hands on one hip and is turning in circles, sweeping his headlamp over the rock. He looks for all the world like he’s searching for something he’s lost.

That deep, nasty sense of foreboding he’s been nursing since the entrance begins to deepen in Jack’s stomach.

“Algie!” Teddy calls again. “The crabs! The dry-drum!”

Algie stops mid-turn and wraps both arms around his middle. To Jack’s eye, he seems very far away all of a sudden, very lonely.

“I don’t…” he starts. His voice seems flat, muffled somehow, barely carrying to where Jack and Gus are standing over by the chamber entrance even though he’s only a few feet away. “I can’t find it. The dry-drum. It was in the tackle-sack, and I swear I would have noticed if I dropped it, guys, I mean – it was clipped to my _belt_. But it must have… it’s gone.”

And just like that, Jack’s headtorch dies.

Jack’s immediate and overwhelming realisation is that caves are – and he knows this is stupid even as the thought strikes him – dark. The thing about having his torch on his helmet, he realises, is that everywhere he’d been any time he’d ever gone caving, he’d lit it up without even having to think about it – just by looking at it, every time he moved his head. He’s never actually seen a cave that hasn’t been illuminated, and he hadn’t even thought about how they must look the rest of the time. How dark they are. How their little pools of light just pass through and leave, these massive underground vaults of pure pitch blackness.

Except now that his torch has gone, and it’s just the light of the others, suddenly he can see the rest of the chamber as it really is: swallowed up by the darkness, almost made of it. And the little beams of light from the others’ headtorches look so small, so tiny in comparison. He looks at the little wooden slats over the mine shaft – thinks about dropping into it on that thin rope, about the darkness stretching out far below – and feels his hands beginning to shake.

Gus, immersed in the heated argument that is beginning to brew between Teddy and Algie, looks back at him and seems to realise instantly that Jack is panicking. He takes just a second to flip his headtorch up towards the rock above and then grasps Jack by the forearms. Jack is too far gone to even really register that Gus is touching him.

“Jack, stop. I promise you, it’s fine,” Gus says. His tone is urgent but reassuring, and he’s bending towards Jack, blocking out his view of the shaft. “Look at me. Jack.”

After a second, Jack does. It’s far more difficult to make out his features now that he doesn’t have a light to illuminate them with, but with the residual light from the other’s torches, Jack can make out the basics. His jawline. His wide eyes. His strong nose. The plumes of air billowing from his mouth. The sweep of his hair peeking out from the rim of his helmet.

He doesn’t feel relaxed, per se, but he does feel his hands stop shaking.

“Listen to me,” says Gus. He makes a strange, abortive movement towards him, then seems to think better of it. “It’s fine. We’re going to swap helmets, so you can take my torch. When we find the dry-drum, we can swap back again. It’s fine.”

“Everything ok over there?” yells Hugo over the sound of Teddy and Algie bickering. “What’s up with Jack’s light?”

“Just dead batteries,” Gus calls back airily, letting go of Jack’s arms. “It’s grand. It’s under control.”

And then his own headtorch goes out.

Jack takes several steps backwards automatically before he realises he’s moving back into the darkened passageway they’ve just come from and that is the last place he wants to be without a light. Gus doesn’t seem to notice for a minute; it’s only when he turns back to look at Jack that he must register something’s up. He flips his headtorch back down towards the ground and waves a gloved hand in front of it. When his palm remains stubbornly and resolutely dark, his face goes eerily blank. Without a word, he starts moving towards the others where they’re clustered on the platform.

Jack would give almost anything in the world to be as far away from that shaft, but if it’s a toss-up between standing alone in the dark in the passage and standing next to the shaft in the light, there’s no real competition. He jogs a few steps to catch up with Gus.

For a brief second, when he steps foot onto the platform with a little unnerving creak, he thinks he can hear an answering sound from below – a wet kind of shuffle, like the sound of a damp oversuit sliding along a cave wall. With a burst of panic so strong it’s almost painful, he eyes the shaft beneath his feet. But the darkness between the uneven planks is completely impenetrable. _Stupid, _he berates himself, squeezing his fists, and forces himself to keep moving. _What could be down there? What were you expecting?_

Nevertheless, when he reaches the others at the ladder hole, he purposefully positions himself between Gus and the edge.

“I need batteries,” Gus is saying tightly. “Double A. Four if you’ve got them. Does anyone have any spares?”

“Uh, what did we do with the spares? Didn’t you have them this morning?” says Hugo, patting his pockets and then turning towards Teddy. “I thought you put them in your inside pocket? Or gave them to Algie?”

As they all turn to look at him, Algie’s headtorch dies.

For perhaps five long seconds, nobody says anything. Jack feels the darkness behind him like a physical presence, encroaching on their little patch of light. Only two small beams between them and the complete blackness. How fragile it is. How vulnerable.

“The spare batteries…” says Algie quietly, but he runs out of steam and has to start again. “I put. The spare batteries. In the dry drum.”

There’s a beat, and then Hugo holds up his hands. He looks the very picture of ease: Jack cannot for the life of him imagine how he is doing it.

“First things first, gentlemen,” he says easily. “Let’s not panic.”

“Easy to say when you’ve got a 1800 lumen LED torch and powerpack strapped to your head,’ Algie shoots back instantly. He’s shaking. Jack thinks he knows the feeling. “I have _no_ lights and _no_ batteries, so I think I’m going to start panicking whenever I like.”

Gus reaches over to punch him on the arm.

“_Stop _it,” he hisses. “This isn’t just about you. If one of us panics, the rest of us are going to lose it, so we need to _keep our heads_.”

Hugo’s nodding, but Gus rounds on him next.

“And we need to go,” he says, in a tone that brooks no argument. “We need to leave, and we need to go _right_ _now._”

From the planks beneath his feet, Jack thinks he can hear it again: a wet, slithering kind of sound. If he strains, he can occasionally hear a very quiet, metallic clink, like the sound his harness has been making when he’s brushed against passage walls.

The second time he thinks he hears it, he sees Algie’s head turns sharply, like a hunted animal. Even though Teddy and Hugo’s lights are focused in on each other and Algie’s face is deep in shadow, Jack can see how wide his eyes are and how flared his nostrils are. He’s looking directly past Jack, at the edge of the ladder hole.

Jack wishes, more than anything, that he wouldn’t. There’s nothing there. There’s nothing down there. There can’t be anything living down there, not at the bottom of a closed-down mine in the Arctic Circle. They are alone down here.

He forces himself to look over to Teddy, who is frowning. He’s quiet and still next to Algie, who’s restlessly bouncing from foot to foot, but he still looks deeply uneasy: even his mouth is twisting. Jack thinks this might be the closest concession he has ever seen Teddy make towards expressing discomfort, with the clear exception of Hugo’s disastrous phone call.

“I mean it, Hugo, we need to _leave_,” Gus is saying. He’s clenching his fists in the legs of his oversuit. “I’m sorry, but this was a bad idea and we need to go, _now, _before anything else happens.”

“Gus, I get it, but it’s just bad luck,” says Hugo with an infuriating air of placation, “and we just forgot to replace the batteries. Teddy’s been charging his overnight, and I put mine in _this morning_. I’m not saying let’s not leave – clearly we can’t go any further with only two headtorches - I’m just saying we’ve got enough time to pack up the kit. I don’t want to leave £200 worth of rope to rot in some Norwegian mine because we freaked out.”

“I don’t _care _about the rope,” says Gus, and for all his talk to Algie about keeping his head, he’s as close to angry as Jack has ever seen him. “I care about the fact that we are in a cave where we’ve never been before, standing over a 30m pitch, we are rapidly running out of lights, and _one of us has never even SRT’d before_. You said we could leave this passage whenever we wanted? I want to leave. And I want Jack out of here.”

Any other time, any other place and with any other person, Jack would be spitting mad for speaking about him like that: singling him out like he’s weak, like he needs the help. But standing on that platform over the impenetrable darkness of that shaft – with the hole gaping open behind him and _that sound, _the slither and the soft clink of metal, _like a chain dragging over the step of a ladder _– he understands that Gus understands, and the look he shoots at Gus is one of pure, naked thanks.

Gus looks back at him – really looks at him, and there’s a look on his face that Jack has never seen before. It’s like determination mixed with a kind of soft, helpless vulnerability completely unlike anything Jack has witnessed in him, and for some reason it sets Jack’s palms sweating and his heart racing.

It strikes him very suddenly that although he and Gus have been close for almost a year now, he’s never really seen Gus be any kind of vulnerable. He’s always thought of Gus as someone incapable of hiding his emotions – most of the time, Jack thinks he can watch a thought cross his face before it even reaches his mouth – but for the first time he wonders how much Gus can hide behind that kind of face. Whether being so completely and openly honest about most things is a good way of hiding the rest, even if it’s not on purpose.

Gus goes on looking at him, beautiful and earnest and fragile. And he’s opening his mouth like he’s about to speak when, as if on cue, Teddy’s light dies.

In the awful, ringing silence that falls after, Jack feels someone fumbling for his hand. He looks over to Algie next to him, pale in the dim light of their last torch, mouthing something but so mute with terror that even though he is pressing into Jack’s side Jack cannot hear at all what he is saying. He is looking at something over Jack’s shoulder. At the shaft. At the hole where the ladder is.

Jack might privately admit that he has made many tough decisions in his life, the kind that most of the people he knows at Oxford have never had to face. That is partially why, he thinks, he likes caving. It seems difficult and scary, but what it boils down to is a set of simple decisions far more easy than others he’s been making since he was small: climb over this. Squeeze through that. Don’t look down. Dangerous, but ultimately straightforward, and nothing in comparison to what he has already experienced.

So given everything he’s lived through, the decision to turn from their little circle of light, to face the shaft and see what has first Algie and now the rest of them all turning in horror – it should be easy.

It isn’t. It’s agonising. But he does it. And he can see clearly that in Hugo’s last little beam of light, their protection against the darkness, there is a sixth person climbing up the last step of the ladder – hunched, with a round dark head and glistening skin.

As if in a dream, Jack sees the other four of them turning to run. He thinks he sees Gus reach for where he would be, if he could bring himself to move. But by the time he can will his legs to stumble forward for him, the planks underfoot are already giving way beneath him, crashing into the ladder and sending the whole thing cascading down into the shaft: all of it. The platform, the steps. Him.

As he falls, he sees Hugo’s light twinkle above him for a brief second before that goes out, too.


	5. Chapter 5

Jack can’t – absolutely cannot – think about what’s happening, so he just acts. On some kind of animal instinct, he thrusts out his hand blindly and grabs the descending rope, clenching his fist around it as tight as he physically can. There’s a burst of pain as the shock hits his shoulder joint and his wild fall is briefly checked, but he can’t grip tight enough to stop falling all together. The rope runs through his hand as he plummets, shredding through the padding of his cheap fingerless glove and then biting into his skin as it rips through his grasp.

It can’t take more than ten seconds before he hits the ground. He slams his head hard into the ground as he lands, winded, and his palm and fingers throbs like they’re on fire, but he’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive.

The darkness is like nothing he has ever felt before. Like the rest of them, he’s sat in a dark chamber in a safe Brecon cave and flicked off his headlamp to wave his hand blindly in front of his face. Hugo, his voice lurid with horror, had described how in the absolute blackness your brain starts to paint pictures for you, because it can’t handle the lack of visual information. Entertained, Jack had strained to see his own ghostly fingertips dancing in front of his eyes until Hugo’s high-powered torch had flicked back on and they’d started forwards again.

This is nothing like that. He can’t even move to check if by some miracle he can fix his torch back on again. Like a dog staked on a leash, his mind keeps bouncing back to that dark figure, solid and stark as it was in his pathetic pale beam. It could be next to him, his brain says. It could be coming for him out of the darkness. It could be reaching for him. There could be hundreds of them.

Jack turns over and retches, but there’s nothing in his stomach.

He's still on his hands and knees, trying to catch his breath, when he begins to see a light growing in the distance out of the corner of his eye: slowly, so slowly he thinks he might be imagining it. He pushes himself up to sitting to watch it brighten. For a brief, almost painfully hopeful second, he thinks it might be another caver surfacing from the darkness. But it’s not moving in swings like a torch or a lamp: it’s dawning steadily, like the sun.

It takes less than thirty seconds for Jack to realise what he's seeing, and all the dread and fear and foreboding that have been dogging his footsteps condense into a solid, cold point in the centre of his chest. He doesn’t see rock or stone or ice or anything else he’d expect in a cave. He sees, impossibly, a patch of snow, illuminated by nothing he can really tell, lying bright and white and clean on the floor of the cave just as it does hundreds of feet above him.

He's still trying to fit the snow into the picture he's stupidly, desperately trying to build, when the heels of boots drag sharply through it as if being dragged. The suddenness and violence of the movement are enough to send him jerking backwards in terrified surprise, letting out a tiny, breathless scream. He can’t see anything else – the rest of the cave is as pitch black as it ever was – but he watches, frozen in place, as the booted feet cut a neat, sharp line through the snow and back into the darkness. As they disappear, he thinks he sees them twitch, just once, and the sight sends a wave of horror worse than anything he’s felt so far rolling through him. After a breathless moment the noise comes to him much like it did on the platform, but clearer this time: the clinking of something that sounds less and less like the muffled noise of climbing equipment and more like the clean, metallic sound of chains. The dragging of feet. The muffled sound of voices.

The rest of it comes quickly, in a series of fragmented images. The man. The post. The water. The knives. The darkness, the years upon years upon years of it. The worst and most horrendous story of the men who lived above, compressed into a merciless barrage of feelings and images. It is maybe the worst two minutes of his life and it leaves him absolutely sobbing, gasping for breath into the cold and the blackness.

It’s difficult for Jack to tell when the image of darkness fades and the real darkness of the cave re-establishes himself. But at a certain point there is nothing left but the sound of his own muffled, harsh breathing and a horror and a grief and a tension so thick that Jack can’t stand it for more than a second before he feels like he has to move. If there’s something out there, he thinks, he would rather it kill him like it did the poor man at the post than have to sit and think about it for another second.

When he jerks out his arm into the darkness, his fingertips hit something soft and damp.

His other hand has been clamped firmly over his mouth, so he doesn’t scream. What escapes from between his fingers is a long-drawn out moan, punctuated by his desperate breathing. He retracts his hand like it’s been burned and starts to scramble backwards on his backside and his elbow, pushing through the wreckage of the platform until he hits the solid rock of the shaft wall.

The sound of wet, smooth skin sliding over rock towards him is the most physically repulsive thing he has ever heard. He wants to rip off his hearing aid, but he’s terrified of losing it in the dark, and not knowing seems worse, somehow, than hearing the noise moving towards him. He’s still got one hand clamped over his mouth like a vice; no longer moaning but just whimpering now, pathetic little noises that are almost entirely swallowed by the fabric of his glove. He feels tears leaking down over his fingers.

He’s rocked by another vision: and a wave of loneliness. The unspeakable, crushing emptiness of living down here, down in the dark and the cold and the damp for years upon years upon _years_. How tragically, stupidly familiar it feels.

Inevitably, he thinks about Gus. Then he thinks about Teddy and Hugo and Algie and those four long and painful years between losing his dad and moving to Oxford: moving through crowds without ever being seen, coming home every night to a tiny, empty flat. Lying in bed every night, thinking about getting up every morning like a curse. And then, how transforming it was to be seen. The way it feels when Gus looks at him.

And he understands what’s down in the dark with him here. The man – the boots in the snow. It’s him. Not the killer, but the killed.

How incomparably lonely it must be for him, down here in the dark. Jack cannot even imagine how long he must have been here for. No light. No friends. No family, if he ever had any. Just the damp and the rock and the dark and the echoes of his death. Waves of loneliness crash over Jack, each one stronger than the last, strong enough that he finds himself bending over at the waist, choking on them.

The noise drops into silence. Whatever’s moving towards him has stopped.

Overwhelmed, he puts out his hand again. When he feels the damp, cold skin just foot away he flinches, but he doesn’t pull away.

“I’m sorry,” he says, half-sobbing, before he can stop himself. “I’m _so_ sorry. Honestly – I am so, so sorry.”

And he thinks about the way that Gus looks at him, just the two of them, when they’re up late and working on separate essays together, the smile he gives when Jack asks a question Gus clearly thinks is clever. He thinks about how it feels when Hugo older-brothers him – that unmistakable sense of fond exasperation, listening to advice you’re never going to take from someone who loves you anyway. Teddy, whose stupid, sardonic jokes he will never, ever admit that he finds funny even though every now and then he’ll have to turn away to hide that he’s tearing up with laughter. He and Algie teaming up to make fun of Hugo at karaoke, building stupid insult onto stupid insult until one of them collapses with laughter.

“I miss my mother,” he blurts out, stupidly. “I thought it would get easier but it never did. It never did.”

Slowly, he feels a hand slide over his knee. Sick with fear, he waits for it to move, to hit him or dig into his suit or fly up and choke him, but it just lies there. And they sit like that for a while, Jack and the figure, while he gets his heartbeat under control, and after a minute he starts to talk about anything and everything: his parents, his grandfather, his friends at school, Gus and Hugo and the others. He tells the figure everything he can remember about his mother.

He doesn’t know if he’s doing the right thing – if there is a right thing to be done here – but that awful sense of foreboding that’s been hanging over him like an axe since he first set eyes on the mine entrance has dissipated and he just feels – relief. And the figure beside him is silent and still the whole time, seemingly just absorbing the facts of Jack’s love for the others until he runs out of words to say.

Hesitantly, when he’s finally stopped talking, he feels a hand steal up to cover his. They sit like that for a minute, the heat leeching slowly out of Jack’s fingers. But he doesn’t feel panicked or scared, just – peacefully drained.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, quieter this time. “For what happened to you, for what they did to you. You didn’t – nobody could do anything to deserve that. It shouldn’t have happened. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

There’s no response. Stupid, Jack thinks. Even if the figure could speak, what would it say that Jack would understand?

Instead of speech, another wave of emotion hits him. After a little, aching pulse of gratitude, a kind of pure, clean longing – so bright and so powerful Jack finds himself folding over himself again. It’s the sun, Jack thinks, longing for the sun – how it fills the sky when it sets, painting everything it touches; how bright it looks overhead glinting off the snow through the slit in a pair of goggles; what it feels like to stand at the end of a six-month night and watch it rise again for the first time in months, when the darkest parts, deep down, have been saying it will never come again.

“It’s still up there,” Jack says into the darkness, clutching the cold damp hand so hard he’s worried he’s hurting it. “Please believe me. It’s up there. If I can – if we can climb up again. Maybe we can make it. You can follow me. You can see it again.”

Very slowly, he feels the other hand tighten on his and then let go. Jack throws his arm out, chasing it, but instead of hitting flesh or clothing, what touches his hand is the climbing rope.

A second of hope and disbelief so strong it’s almost painful, Jack finds himself gripping it like a lifeline. He’s laughing, so quick and sharp it almost sounds like hiccoughs.

“You can come with me, if you like,” he says, into the darkness. “You can follow me up. We can make it out.”

There is no reply of any kind.

“I’ll – I’ll leave it for you,” he says, and then he pulls himself to standing.

It takes an age. Alone in the darkness, Jack threads his ascenders by feel and hauls himself up onto the rope. Foot by endless foot, he begins to climb. At no point does he feel anyone touch the rope under him, and he tries not to think about what he’s leaving behind in the darkness. He focuses on the climb.

With the platform and the ladder gone, he can’t just use the ladder to climb like Gus had told him he could, relying on the ropes to keep him safe in case it fell. He has to climb the rope, foot by unending foot, trusting that the top is going to come at some point. His climbing equipment grabbing the rope as it passes through, keeping him attached and secure and stopping him from falling. And the top does come, in the end. After what is probably ten minutes, at the most, but feels like years, his fingers hit the smooth mess of ropes that mark the top of the main rope, and it is only then that he realises: the platform is gone. There is nothing for him to step onto.

The fragile peace that he’d been constructing within him, sitting there on the shaft floor with the lonely stranger – it shatters.

He’s dangling level with the solid rock of the chamber floor, but out over the shaft, too far from the edge to safely step onto it. If he reaches out his foot, he can _just _feel it – his toes hitting the solid rock of the shaft edge, close enough for him to gain a tiny bit of purchase – but not close enough.

_After all this, _he thinks, and stupidly, numbly, he beats his fists against the wall of the shaft. Again and again he shifts his weight towards the edge of the shaft, willing his whole body to just move, scrabbling at the wall to find the belay ropes that lead up to the shaft and tugging at them to bring himself forward. But it’s useless: the same climbing equipment that is keeping him safe and tight against the rope and stops him from falling has him stuck dangling out there over that shaft. And he knows what he has to do.

Back at the tree, after he’d put the harness on and practised getting on and off the rope – doing everything in a very specific order, Gus had assured him, so you always know what’s next – he and Gus had perched on the roots of the tree and Gus had methodically taken him through the whole process, step by step.

It was all very straight-forward, Gus had explained. You don’t climb the cliffs in caves: you climb a rope. When you’re climbing the rope and you’re moving, you’re not scared and you don’t think about the height, because you’re focusing on climbing. Some cliffs you can just keep climbing until you reach solid ground and you’re fine. But mostly, when you reach the top, there are certain things you have to do that can be a little harder.

Sometimes when you’re climbing, before you reach the top, you reach a knot where the rope is tied into the cliff, he’d explained. It’s designed to keep the main rope away from the cliff edge and to stop it from fraying. But if you want to get past it and reach that cliff edge, you have to take off your climbing gear and reattach it somewhere else, onto the knot or a higher rope. Otherwise you can’t reach.

You did this by – and he said this very fast – clipping your cow’s tails into the knot, unclipping your climbing equipment, and letting yourself fall onto your tails, trusting you’ve attached them right. And then you can either attach your equipment into the higher ropes, or scramble over the edge.

And it’s safe, he said. If you do it right, some part of your equipment is always secure on the ropes or the knot. You’re never in danger. But it’s a hard thing to do, because your climbing equipment is the only thing you know for sure is keeping you safe on the rope. So that moment of freefall onto your cow’s tails can be… difficult.

Jack was sure he looked as ill and confused as he felt, and maybe Gus had realised that he was scaring Jack, because he had flashed him one of his big, reassuring smiles.

Don’t worry, he’d said – this is why we don’t cave alone. There will always be someone to tell you what to do and check your ropes and make sure you’re safe, and when the time comes and you’re comfortable, we’ll trust you to do same for us.

At the time, Gus’ pronouncement of trust had meant so much to him. He’d ducked his head and Gus, a little gentle, had touched him lightly on the shoulder, and he’d daydreamed all through the pre-climb checks and preparations for ages about helping them all out of some terrifying abyss – until he’d climbed halfway up the rope without thinking about it and had taken his first look at the ground ten metres under his feet.

It’s almost funny to think about it now, that jolt of panic he’d felt when he’d seen Gus so small on the ground underneath him, between his hanging feet. Only ten metres up, in broad daylight. How stupid that seems now.

In the end, it doesn’t take too long to attach his cow’s tails. He fumbles a little over the placement, but it’s easier than he’d expected, finding the right places – even with his cold fingers, damaged palm and his complete lack of vision. It only takes him about thirty seconds before the crabs on the ends of the ropes close smoothly into the knot.

Unclipping his chest ascender and falling onto those ropes is something else entirely.

Academically, he knows that he has to take off his climbing equipment if he wants any chance of making it out of the shaft. The ropes he has attached to his harness are a foot long and should give him enough leeway that he can get a foothold onto the rock of the chamber floor, or at least enough that he can clip his ascender back into belay ropes leading horizontally along the wall, and then he can climb out from there. But there’s a difference between knowing something and _knowing something, _and when it comes to unclipping the only thing he knows _for sure_ that is keeping him from falling into an underground pit, it makes all the difference in the world.

He would estimate that it takes him at least half an hour, dangling out there in the complete dark, to pull himself up and free his equipment. In that complete and endless dark, the drop which he knows, is only 30 metres – a 30 metres that he knows first-hand he can survive – spirals away endlessly beneath him. He unclips and reclips his cow’s tails at least six times, possibly more; enough that Hugo’s simple knot, so clear and straightforward even to his fingers in the pitch darkness, transforms into a mess of ropes under his fingers and he has to stop for fear of making an irrevocable mistake.

Just let go, he tells himself, feeling the drop yawning underneath him like some hungry mouth. Unclip your chest ascender. If you don’t take it off, you’ll be here forever. Drop. Just let go.

In the end, he can’t do it until he tells himself he’s going to fall. In the split second of peace and acceptance that follows – the numb weight of knowing that he is going to fall and die – it feels like a reflex of his body acts for him, methodically lifting his body weight, spinning open his gadget, pulling out the rope and letting himself drop.

For what feels like forever, he falls.

In reality, it must be less than a second before his ropes catch against the knot, checking his wild plummet and swinging him into the wall of the shaft. But in that brief stretch of time, there is nothing between Jack and that yawning, endless dark – no up, no down, no ropes, no friends. No Gus to check his ropes. Just falling.

After that, it is nothing at all to feel out the edge with his foot and finally, finally, pull himself to standing. He’s not quite close enough to the edge to have his whole balance safely on the floor, but after the drop, it’s almost comically easy to attach his gear into the horizontal rope, unclip his cows' tails and haul himself solidly onto the ground. And that’s it. He’s standing on the rock of the chamber floor, solid ground under his feet.

In truth, it takes him maybe twenty minutes to start thinking practically about what comes next. All that time he is standing, leaning against the wall, thinking about absolutely nothing at all.

It takes him that long for him to realise, but he is already so numb from the emptiness that swallowed him up on the rope that he doesn’t even panic: he’d been so focused on climbing, on getting up to the top of the cliff and away off those ropes, that he hadn’t even stopped to think about what’s between here and the entrance. The boulder choke, the twisting passages, the hidden drops.

He’d have to crawl out on his hands and knees if he wanted to be sure he wouldn’t put a foot wrong, he thinks, and he sags against the wall. Even then, they’d hit at least four junctions before reaching the drop. One wrong junction and he’d be wandering back into the tunnels with no way of telling what way is right. And that fucking boulder choke: like a 3d puzzle, like on the game shows he used to watch as a child, kids scrambling through a maze up and down and in all directions. Every time he thinks he’s sure about the way they came, he pictures it a little differently and then he’s sure all over again, and again, and again, and then not sure of anything at all.

He drops to one knee, then the other and rests his useless, empty head against the wall of the chamber.

Then, in the absolute and unending black he hears the slow footsteps in the passage from what sounds like a mile away.

Slowly, very slowly, he is aware of his breath coming in great, swooping gulps, louder in the darkness than any sound he has ever heard before. But he can’t stop himself from making it any more than he can make himself move away from whatever is coming towards him. If there are more horrors down here. If whatever was at the bottom of that drop changed its mind.

He’s standing back up, pressing himself as far into the mine wall as he possibly can but the rattling, shaking breaths keep escaping his mouth, drawing whatever’s coming directly towards him. He can’t stop it.

He is seized by the absolute certainty that he does not want to die.

A hand lands on his wrist and Jack chokes, uncontrollably. It’s cold and wet and it’s shaking just as much as his is. He doesn’t move as it drags up his sodden sleeve, up his neck, freezing skin against freezing skin until it finds the compact, curved hearing aid perched behind his ear.

“Jack?” says Gus from inches away, out of the darkness. His voice is higher and more terrified than Jack has ever heard him before. His shaking hand moves over Jack’s face, pointlessly pushing the hair out of his eyes, cupping his cheek. For a brief second, his thumb brushes over Jack’s lip.

“Jack?” he says again, almost pleading.

All things considered, Jack thinks he handles it very well.

“I love you,” he says, and he bursts into tears.

Gus reacts instantly. It is, Jack thinks with relief, like every time Gus has held back from touching him before has built up inside of him and finally broken through. In the darkness, Gus scoops him up bodily, closer than Jack thinks he’s ever been held before, resting his head on top of Jack’s and cradling his neck in one hand. Starved, Jack presses closer, but he is too cold and too tired to support Gus’ full weight so they slide down awkwardly to their knees, Gus still holding onto Jack like he’s afraid he might disappear, one arm so tight around his waist that all Jack’s climbing equipment is pressing painfully into his chest.

“I love you,” Gus says over his head, in his achingly familiar, achingly reassuring whisper. He’s rocking them together slightly. “Oh God, Jack, I thought you were dead. God, I love you, I love you, I love you.”

It takes a few minutes of staring out into that darkness, eyes open even though it makes no difference, but eventually that all-pervasive feeling of Gus’ presence, a fact in a world made up of nothing but darkness, soothes him enough that the shaking that is coursing through his whole body begins to calm. He leans further into Gus’ chest and there’s none of Gus’ constant warmth, none of his familiar smell – completely overpowered by the damp, filthy oversuit and the muck and grime they’re both coated in – but the solidity of his body, the constant, unshakable pressure of his arm around Jack’s waist and hand on his neck, is what Jack needs to finally understand that there’s solid rock under his feet again.

He leans his face into Gus’ neck and before he can stop himself, presses his lips close-mouthed against Gus’ skin in a gesture of relief and love and the most profound gratitude he has ever experienced in his life.

Gus’ breath catches, and then Jack feels him lean back and gently cup Jack’s jaw with one hand. There’s a second where he can’t process what’s happening until he feels Gus’ breath, gentle across his mouth, and even then, when he tilts his head up it’s more out of instinct than belief that this might actually be happening.

Nonsensically, he closes his eyes.

And they’re kissing in the darkness, Gus sliding a hand up the back of Jack’s neck, fingers colliding awkwardly with the back of his helmet. His other arm stays tight around Jack’s waist. Jack brings his own uninjured hand up, knots it through Gus’ short curls and touches his thumb gently into the soft hollow behind Gus’ jaw. Gus kisses him slowly and unhurriedly, like there’s nothing else in the world happening than the two of them touching, absorbing enough that Jack feels himself fall all the way into it. His mouth is so much warmer than the rest of him, warm enough that Jack feels it flooding all the way through him. It’s unbelievable, Jack thinks, _unbelievable – _and presses closer.

When Gus catches Jack’s lip with his teeth, Jack lets out a tiny noise, and then Gus goes absolutely stiff.

Like the breaking of a spell, he jerks away completely. Jack hears him fall backwards and hit the ground with a hiss of pain, but Jack stays where he is, frozen in place. A chill kind of panic is draining through him in the place of warmth. Their legs are still tangled together where they were kneeling on the freezing rock. Of _course he wouldn’t – _Jack thinks, panicked. _Unbelievable, of course, of course, of course –_

“God – Jack – sorry, mate, I didn’t mean to –“ Gus says, voice thick with horror.

In the darkness, Jack fumbles for his hand like a drowning man at sea.

“Please,” he says, desperately. “I know. But please.”

* * *

When the warm, yellow light begins to flicker up in the passage to their left, he and Gus have been kneeling by the shaft, helmets pressed together, for longer than he cares to estimate.

Jack feels more confused and guilty and ashamed than he has ever felt in his entire life, and more stupid: everything that has happened to them down in the dark, and it’s the moment that Gus had broken away from him that he can’t stop replaying. How ridiculous. How miserable. And in the growing light, Gus looks almost as wretched as Jack himself feels: when he meets Jack’s eyes, he’s almost pleading.

How _stupid_ he was, Jack thinks again. To think that Gus might – that he would have – when he clearly doesn't –

The light brightens a little as Teddy rounds the passage corner at a reckless pace, holding what looks like the world’s smallest torch. He stops in his tracks as he enters the chamber and begins to pass the beam in wild sweeps over the chamber. When he illuminates the few splintered planks that are all that’s left of the platform and ladder, he lets out a very low, wounded sound, like he’s been punched in the gut.

It brings tears to Jack’s eyes.

As Jack immediately starts unfolding, Teddy must pick up the movement because he swings the torch around with alarm. Jack tries to pull himself to his feet, but Gus is still kneeling, still clutching onto his hand, so he ends up half-crouched, blinded by the light of Teddy’s torch.

“Oh, my _God_,” he hears Teddy breathe, with more emotion than Jack has ever heard from him before. He lowers the beam and starts sprinting towards them.

A second later, the passage behind him floods with light which widens out and illuminates the whole chamber as Hugo stumbles through. Behind him is Algie, holding a massive car torch that he must have swiped from their four-by-four.

When Hugo sees Jack and Gus, still crouched by the shaft, he just looks at them. And Jack, for the first time, really understands what’s happening here: they came back for him, all of them. Not just Gus. They could have waited for Eriksson’s team to reach the surface again, to come back down with the safety of numbers and experienced cavers and real torches. But they didn’t. Into the dark and the danger of that figure, they came for him.

Teddy reaches them half a second later, and throws himself into them, knocking them into the chamber wall. Gus lets out a small pained noise as his back hits the rock and Teddy backs off slightly, wincing.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he says, but he’s still holding both of them fiercely, one in each arm. Jack bends his head towards him, clenches his fist in the side of Teddy’s oversuit, and just enjoys the sensation of being clearly and uncomplicatedly held.

Hugo comes up behind them, shadowed by Algie. His face is completely blank. When he crouches to look at them, even though he’s meeting Jack’s eye, it feels like he isn’t.

“What happened?” he says. His voice lacks any kind of inflection.

Fleetingly, Jack thinks about trying to explain everything he saw and heard: the platform. The ropes. The figure in the dark. He decides very quickly to keep it simple.

“The platform collapsed. I climbed back up,” he says. Beside him, Gus inhales sharply and squeezes his hand.

Hugo just looks at him.

‘On the ropes? In the dark? By… yourself?’ he says slowly. He looks at Gus, who shrugs. Jack doesn’t say anything.

Hugo takes one long, deep breath, and lets it out slowly.

“Jack,” he says very steadily, after a beat. “Jack, I’m so sorry. I can’t – I cannot imagine what that must have been like. And Gus. This is my fault.” His voice wobbles only a little. “I am so sorry.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Jack says instantly. His voice comes out far harsher than he means it to be: startled, Hugo flinches.

Jack takes a breath and tries again.

“I don’t give a _shit_,” he says, “about what led us here. Hugo, I don’t care. Ok, yeah, ideally, we would never have come here. But I don’t care. You came back for me. That’s what matters, Hugo. I mean, it was stupid, don’t get me wrong, I was probably dead. But you did it anyway.”

Beside him, Gus is squeezing his hand so hard it hurts.

“But I got you into this,” says Hugo, and there’s a note of hysteria in his voice now. “I pushed you, I shouldn’t have, you almost _died –_“

‘Hugo,’ says Jack kindly, breaking across him. ‘Listen to me - _shut_ up.’

“Alright,” says Hugo, on an exhale. He rocks back on his heels, pushing his palms into his eye-sockets. “Alright. Alright.”

“Can we go home now?” Jack says, plaintively, and Teddy starts to laugh.


	6. Chapter 6

Getting back out of the cave is a fairly difficult process. The passages themselves are mostly fine – between the five of them, they have the three torches that Hugo and the others swiped from the car, and it’s enough for all of them to see their way – but in the choke, two of them have to crawl without any light. Gus, who has been right next to Jack the entire time, drops his hand as they approach but immediately grabs Hugo’s torch and wraps Jack’s now-empty fingers around it with a vehemence that’s almost painful. He resists all Teddy’s efforts to make him carry another and settles for entering the choke just behind Jack and sticking close to him all the way.

When they reach the other side, Gus grabs his hand straightaway without saying anything or even looking at him and they walk like that, side by side, hand in hand and wordless, the whole way out of the cave.

Gus doesn't say a word the whole time. It's not until they’re in the car, driving back, when Jack thinks he can’t bear it anymore: Algie is asleep beside them and Hugo and Teddy are ensconced in a very quiet front-seat conversation, enough that he thinks he can get away keeping it between the two of them if he speaks quietly.

The pressure of Gus’ hand has been like it’s burning where it’s wrapped around his – and he is haunted, every second, by the absolute dichotomy between the horror in Gus’ voice when he’d realised what they were doing and the tenderness with which he’s been treating Jack the whole time since.

“We can just like… forget about it. If you want,” he says, evenly. He sees Gus freeze out of the corner of his eye.

“Oh,” says Gus, very quietly. He is staring straight ahead into the headrest of Hugo’s seat. Jack still can barely see him, just out of the corner of his eye, because he is putting almost as much effort into staring straight ahead through the driver window.

“I get it, you know. It was a life-threatening situation,” Jack battles on. “I mean, we were both – terrified. We could have been saying or doing anything back there. It’s fine.”

“It’s fine,” Gus repeats, in a high-pitched voice.

“I’m sorry,” Jack says. He thinks he has never felt so bad in so many ways. “I didn’t mean to – say or do anything to make feel you should say something or do anything, or give you the wrong idea. I know you didn’t mean to.”

“It’s fine,” says Gus again, and his voice is even higher. “Grand. I wouldn’t want - I understand.”

It’s not fine. Jack knows it isn’t fine. He is desperate to say it all over again – that he loves Gus, that he loves him, that he _loves_ him. That he can’t believe Gus came back for him, down in the darkness of those caves with no light and no map and no idea of the dangers.

But that’s what makes it worse, he thinks – for Gus to care for him enough to brave that shadow, to actively choose to turn around and walk towards whatever Jack found at the bottom of that shaft, without the others or even a light – and so Jack can care enough to apologise for kissing him, for saying – what he said – for getting Gus so caught up in Jack's own feelings, when Gus was clearly not intending to –

He winces and shuts his eyes, tight.

The worst part is that Gus still will not let go of his hand, Gus’ bare palm still very gently cradling Jack’s gloved one. It’s trembling slightly, Gus’ thumb stroking the fabric over Jack’s knuckles and he hates Gus a little bit for still holding on when he’s trying so hard to let Gus let go. And as much as he is telling himself he needs to, he cannot bring himself to pull away.

Gus keeps that hold on his hand all the way back to the caving hut. 

When Eriksson answers the door, clearly fresh from showering away his own day’s exertions, whatever question he has dies on his lips when he sees the four of them. Jack doesn’t want to think about how terribly pale and scared they all must look, how when one of Eriksson’s friends appears behind him, they all draw together instinctively on the doorstep. He feels Algie stepping in close behind him. Reflexively, he squeezes Gus’ hand and places his injured palm gently on Teddy’s shoulder, who briefly reaches up to cover it with one of his own.

“You went down the other passage,” Eriksson says, scrutinising them. It’s not a question, but there is no hint of blame or judgement.

Hugo nods.

“Yes,” he says, politely but firmly. “You were right. We’ll explain tomorrow, but right now we all need to get inside and rest.”

Eriksson steps back immediately with a quiet word in Norwegian to his friend, and they both disappear into the kitchen while Jack and the others all shed their shoes and drop their bags and helmets. After a moment, Eriksson and his friend reappear, carefully carrying a stack of plates, cutlery and a bowl of what looks like stew, and they set them down on the table by the fire.

As the smell hits, Jack realises how hungry he really is, and all four of them descend like they haven’t seen food in weeks. When he finishes scraping his bowl, he thanks Eriksson, who gives him a little nod.

“It’s what we do,” he says. “Are you… are you safe? Up here?”

“_Yes_,” says Jack emphatically, ignoring the way the others are watching them. “Yes. You were right, we shouldn’t have gone, but I don’t think we’re in any danger anymore.”

Eriksson looks relieved and pleased.

“Would you like me to stay?” he offers. “Here? Tonight?”

“Er –“ Jack starts awkwardly, unsure how exactly how to say he doesn’t think that’s necessary without offending Eriksson. But he thinks his face must do it for him, because Eriksson smiles.

“Ok then. I will – hm. I will leave the dog,” he says, with just an undercurrent of humour. “His name is Isaak. He looks after himself. I think he may help. Please be kind to him.”

He doesn’t stick around long after that, citing a need to look after the rest of his own team, but is definite that he’ll be returning early the next day. When he’s gone, all four of the others politely order Jack into the shower first, but he begs off on account of his injuries. While Hugo and then Teddy shower, Algie insists on treating Jack’s wounded palm himself.

He does so with a thorough and quiet professionalism that Jack finds surprisingly reassuring; it’s the first time Jack’s seen him perform any kind of medical assistance without not-so-casually dropping the fact that his course is the first in the world and for some reason, he’d expected Algie’s pride to have been masking some kind of incompetence or self-consciousness. But as he works, cleaning and sealing Jack’s palm and then gently inspecting the other scrapes and knocks that Jack amassed falling down that long drop, he is for once courteous and thorough. Jack finds himself reassessing the image that he’d built of Algie in his head.

Individually, Hugo and Teddy each pass back through the lounge to say they’re headed to bed, and then eventually Algie leaves for his own shower. He tries to wave Jack before him, but Jack’s sick masochism is still riding roughshod over his sensibility, and he thinks he’d like to postpone the moment of leaving Gus again for as long as possible. It doesn’t help that Gus is holding his good hand again – his fingers clamped firmly around Jack’s like a lifeline – and Jack’s conscious of the fact that after they shower and head to bed, that will probably be it. So he motions Algie forward with his bandaged hand.

Algie, to his credit, doesn’t push it.

After he leaves, the silence is excruciating. There’s nothing left to distract him from Gus and the painful, agonising presence all of the things that have happened between them in the past twelve hours: he can feel Gus not looking at him like a physical force, the guilt and shame pushing him down in his chair. Neither of them have said a word to each other since the car. For the life of him, Jack can’t think of anything to say, and Gus doesn’t seem inclined to break the silence either. So they just sit, and sit, and don’t look at each other.

When he finally hears the shower room door opening and closing in the corridor outside, Jack motions for Gus to go ahead of without looking up.

Wordlessly, Gus stands and leaves. Jack feels Gus’ hand finally slip out from his with a horrible and heavy sense of finality and immediately he buries himself up to the wrists in petting Isaak, who is marvellously warm and soft and exactly what Jack needs to distract himself from the horror on horror on horror that has been his day.

He does not stop when he hears the bathroom door open five minutes later, nor does he look up. In fact, he waits fully thirty seconds after he hears the bunkroom door close behind Gus before he starts heading for the showers himself. When he drops in on the bunkroom to grab his clothing and washkit, he purposefully does not look over to Gus’ bed.

The shower is, in a word, beautiful. Jack turns the heat up as high as it will go, burning out the last traces of coldness from every inch of his skin. The heat makes him dizzy and light-headed, and it's not until he feels his shoulders relax under the weight and heat of the water that he realises how tight and tense he's been holding himself. By the time he's ready to leave, he feels almost human again.

When he slips out the door, shivering a little in the freezing air, Gus is waiting for him just inside the lounge. For a moment, he doesn’t notice Jack standing in the doorway. He’s perched on an armchair with Isaak’s head in his lap, his attention focused on gently combing through Isaak's fur, and the expression on his face is nothing so much as it is quietly and absolutely miserable. It physically hurts Jack to look at: for a moment, he feels all the stupid, enormous love he holds for Gus explode inside him like a fucking bomb, and he has to take a deep breath.

Bucking himself up, he knocks his fist gently against the doorframe to announce his presence.

Gus immediately looks up at him, panicked. In the dim light of the fire, he looks so cold and so pale and so heartbreakingly small. Jack watches him as he squares his shoulders and then stands up; close to Jack, but not within comfortable touching distance. Jack is an old hand at trying to ignore the way this makes him feel by now, but this time he has a purpose: after everything Gus has done for him, risked for him - almost lost for him, after _everything_ \- he finds that the need to try and make sure Gus is going to be ok is almost overwhelming. Even if he doesn't have the first clue how he's going to do it.

“Are you - uh, are you ok?” he says, as gently as he possibly can. What a stupid question.

Gus winces, barely. When Jack reaches out a hand towards him, he flinches away, and seeing the uncontrollable flash of hurt on Jack’s face something inside Gus seems to just break. Horrified, Jack sees he is crying.

Gus brings a hand up to his face. He takes one short breath, fast and deep, like he's preparing for a plunge.

“I meant it. Every time I said it,” he says, in a rush, looking at Jack in an expression that is terrified and defiant and tender, all at the same time. He takes another breath, chokes a little. “I love you, Jack, I _love_ you. I’m sorry. I know. I shouldn’t have kissed you. But I did mean it and we should probably talk about it so we can get past it.” His voice cracks. “I don’t – I don’t want you to hate me.”

“Hate you?” says Jack after a second. His voice sounds like it’s coming from very far away, possibly because he has forgotten how to breathe. He cannot for the life of him think of anything else to say.

If possible, Gus shrinks away even more.

“Or not,” he says, very small.

It comes to Jack slowly that Gus is, despite his tears, still speaking lower, and clearer than usual, like he does whenever he knows Jack doesn’t have his hearing aid in. Such a little thing. It almost breaks his heart. And he looks _so_ very small in his pyjamas, which are embossed with his initials and which Jack has felt comfortable enough to make fun of only once.

When Jack takes a step towards him, he moves backwards and shakes his head slightly, like he doesn’t even realise he’s doing it. Jack holds his hands out before him like he’s trying to placate a nervous animal.

“I was – I wasn’t talking about you,” he says slowly, like every word is a puzzle piece he is setting determinedly down in place. “I wasn’t. You think – I was _dead_, Gus, and you came back for me. By _yourself_. With no lights. No map. With no idea where that thing was, or that cliff was. In the dark. You came back for me. You… think I would hate you? You think I want to – _get past _you? You think I don’t _love_ you? You all – all of you, you gave me a place to live – you trusted me – you made me part of your family – and _you_, Gus. All this time, it’s been _you,_ always there, always smiling, always making me feel _part _of things, always–“

He breaks off, intimately struck by the feeling that he is saying all the wrong things. Gus is still small and silent in front of him, staring at him. He doesn’t look like he is taking in anything Jack is saying.

“You think I don’t love you?” says Jack, desperate to make him understand. “With everything you do? Everything you are? How _couldn’t _I?”

When he steps forward this time, Gus doesn’t move backwards. But he also doesn’t respond when Jack, standing up on tiptoes, slips his arms around Gus’ neck and pulls himself closer.

Gus is still, even after his shower, so terribly cold and stiff to touch. For the first time Jack thinks he understands what it must have been like for Gus to try and handle him all this time, to contain everything he feels to gather Gus up so very gently, not to scare him.

“It has _always_ been you,” he says softly, and squeezes his eyes shut against Gus’ neck. “Gus, please believe me. It has _always _been you.”

They stand like that for half a minute, Jack feeling the rise and fall of Gus’ chest against his, and then Gus takes a deep, shuddering breath.

“I thought you were dead,” he says, very quietly, into Jack’s good ear. “All of us did, even when we decided to come back for you. And then I thought you hated me, you said – I thought – you were _never_ entirely comfortable with me, never, and then I kissed you, and then – But I thought, even if you hated me, at least you were alive, at least you–“

He chokes up, but within the circle of Jack’s arms he begins, finally, to loosen up and lean into Jack’s embrace. And when Jack nervously presses his lips against the side of Gus’ neck – still terrified, but slow and deliberate this time – Gus’ head falls forward onto Jack’s shoulder and he takes a deep, peaceful breath. Jack thinks he can feel the last of the tension drain out of Gus’ shoulders.

“Stupid,” Jack says lightly, squeezing a little. He’s crying as well by now, but he can finally feel the joy rising, like champagne bubbles in the bottom of his stomach, making him giddy. “So handsome you forgot how to be clever. _Oh, _I saved this boy’s life, and I’m so friendly and brave and _handsome_, so he must _hate _me. How did you even get into Oxford?”

For a heartbeat, Gus freezes against him again, before letting out a tiny, shocked giggle. Jack thinks it’s perhaps the best noise he’s ever heard.

“I take it back,” says Gus against his head, tears still in his voice but cheerfully, almost disbelievingly aghast, “I take it all back. You _monstrous_ bully. All this time and you were just waiting to ridicule me. To make fun of me, in my most vulnerable moment. You _rascal_.”

And then they’re both laughing in relief, Gus finally slipping his arms around Jack, hoisting him off the ground in a bear hug that squeezes the breath out of him. Jack buries his face in the crook of Gus’ neck and laughs and laughs.

“I love you,” Gus says, lifting him higher, “Jack, I love you, I love you, I _love you.” _

* * *

When Gus sets him down, Jack doesn’t know where to look. He feels at once unable to take his eyes off Gus and then unable to look at him, because Gus is absolutely incapable of keeping any kind of emotion off his face and at this present moment he is radiating a sincere happiness mixed with profound disbelief.

It’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen but he also aches to look at it, so every now and then he’ll blush and duck his head and knock his shoulder into Gus’. And when he does, Gus will take that as his cue to press his face into Jack’s hair, because he seems to be completely incapable of putting any kind of distance between them, if the way he’s holding Jack tight to his chest is anything to go by.

“We should get some sleep,” says Gus eventually, into his hair. “You’ve, er… you’ve had a long day.”

“Yeah,” says Jack reluctantly, with a little shiver. “I guess.”

Nevertheless, it takes them an embarrassing amount of time to make it out of the room and down the ten feet of corridor to the bunkroom. Every step or two they take Gus will slip an arm around his waist, or touch his face, or cup the back of his neck, and Jack will have to stop moving because it’s a lot to take in. He’s still at the very start of getting used to this: Gus, next to him – Gus, touching him. Gus, loving him.

And then Gus will take that opportunity slip his other arm around him or step in front of him to cup his face and then Jack will lean into it like he’s starving, and they’ll forget what they were supposed to be doing until one of them reluctantly brings it up and it starts all over again.

When they reach the door, Jack doesn’t want to be the one to open it, and from the look on Gus’ face he doesn’t want to do it either. Jack takes the pause as an opportunity to pull back from Gus a little and look at him – _really_ look at him, how alive he seems with his bright smile and his wide, shining eyes – and he thinks about nothing more than how much he wants to kiss him.

It takes a second or two for him to remember that he’s allowed to do that now, if Gus will let him. So he stands up on his toes and very gently puts his lips against the corner of Gus’ mouth. With enthusiasm, like he’s been waiting for it, Gus gathers him up to kiss him properly and deeply, turning them around to push him gently into the wall, his arms around Jack’s waist. Jack feels – completely swallowed up in it. They break after a minute, Jack’s heart going a million miles an hour, and he smiles against Gus’ mouth. Gus pulls away only so far, enough that he can rest his cheek against Jack’s forehead. He lets out a low breath. They stand in peaceful silence for a moment.

“So I have a question,” says Jack before he can stop himself, because he is, deep down, a terrible person.

“Mmm?” says Gus absent-mindedly, against his eyebrow.

“So, um, down in the mine, when I said that I loved you,” Jack says innocently, and hears a quiet sigh that he thinks will never, will _never _get old, “what – hmm… what, exactly, did you think that I meant?”

Gus thinks for a second, and then seems to register the underlying tone in Jack’s voice because he goes very still. For a second, Jack’s worried that it’s too soon to be talking about it, but then he feels Gus start shaking.

“I… construed… that you meant… you were pleased to meet with friendly company,” he says, in the light tones of one who is becoming aware with every passing word that what they are saying is very, very stupid. His voice is quivering with laughter. “Whosoever that company might be.”

“And, uh, when I kissed you? On the neck?” Jack says, emboldened. He’s squeezing his own eyes shut to stop the tears of laughter from forming. “What, um… what did you think that was? A brotherly peck of affection and camaraderie?”

“You almost_ died_,” Gus protests loudly, shamefaced. “I thought you were_ emotional!”_

“Uh, yeah, I _was_!” Jack says, utterly delighted. “Because _you_ turned around and crawled back into a hole in the ground to rescue me, like some kind of boy’s own hero!”

“I must say, this is very rich coming from you,” Gus says, drawing himself up. “I mean, I was the one that kissed you on the _mouth._”

“You _apologised _for it!” Jack accuses. “What was I supposed to think?”

“_You_ were – lord, is it all going to be like this?” says Gus dramatically, looking up to the ceiling. He squeezes Jack lightly. “Are we always to be so beset? Is this the cost of love?”

“Yes,” says Jack, definitively. ‘Sorry, but you got yourself into this. You’re stuck with this.’

It’s supposed to be a joke, but Gus looks back down at him directly.

“Yes. Because you love me,” he says softly, and his eyes are shining.

At that moment, the door to the bunkroom slams open. Jack jumps hard enough to bang his head against the wall. In the darkened doorway, he can see Teddy standing, brandishing a dry-drum like a weapon. Algie is peering over his shoulder.

Jack, mortified, freezes in the circle of Gus’ arms. They’re pressed up against the wall opposite, Jack’s arms around Gus’ neck and Gus’ around his waist and could not be more obviously in the middle of – something.

Jack doesn’t look at Gus above him, who’s attempting to turn as far as he can to face the bunkroom door without letting go of Jack. He himself is shrinking back against the wall with equal force. Nobody says a word.

It takes perhaps three long seconds for Teddy to register what, exactly, is happening in the tableaux in front of him. As soon as he does so, Jack sees his familiar, evil grin spreading over his face. He lowers the dry-drum. Behind him, Algie rolls his eyes harder than Jack has ever seen him do before and stumps back into the darkened bunkroom.

“_Finally,”_ Teddy whispers with real emotion, sagging against the doorframe. “This has been the longest year of my _life. _I bet it was you, Miller, wasn’t it? There is no _way _Balfour pulled his head out of his arse long enough to get this sorted.”

Jack, still unable to bring himself to meet anyone’s eyes, makes a sort of muffled, agonised noise. He can feel Gus start to shake with laughter where he still has his arms around Jack’s waist.

“_Jealous_, Wintrington?” he says, brightly. He makes a show of tightening his arms around Jack; Jack thinks Gus is going for jovial, but there’s a sincere and unmistakable note of joy that radiates out from every word Gus says which kind of ruins the joke, and also makes Jack feel hopelessly warm inside. “You’re too late! I beat you to him.”

It is, nevertheless, extremely embarrassing. Horrified, Jack buries his face in Gus’ chest.

“Oh _no,_” says Teddy, dropping the dry drum with a groan. “_Oh_ _no. _For fuck’s sake, I should have thought about this. You’re going to be absolutely insufferable. I should have tried put a stop to this before it was too late, for the good of everyone in the club.”

“You should have made your move when you could have,” Gus points out reasonably. “He’s been here all year.”

“I hate you,” Jack says, muffled, into Gus’ pyjama shirt. “All of you. I knew I should have joined mountaineering instead.”

Gus looks down at him. His expression is unbearably, painfully fond and Jack, helpless, can’t restrain the smile he feels unravelling across his face, even though he knows that Teddy can still see him.

Behind Gus, Teddy aggressively slams the bunkroom door.

Gus gives a soft laugh – just a little huff of breath – before leaning forwards to kiss Jack once, ever-so-softly, on the mouth, and then starting to chivvy him towards the door. Jack’s grumbling is entirely undermined by the massive yawn his traitorous body decides in that moment to bestow upon him, and Gus gets the door open and them both inside with surprisingly little trouble given that he still appears to be trying to stay as close to Jack as physically possible.

There’s a moment, as they both pause inside the door, where Jack feels unbearably awkward: they’ve got their own beds set up separately already, and they haven’t really had any kind of conversation other than establishing the very basics of who likes who and how stupid they’ve both been about many different things. He knows he’s already taken some liberties tonight, but there’s a difference between assuming that it’s fine to lovingly roast someone and really crossing someone’s boundaries, and he doesn’t want to assume that Gus would be comfortable with them sharing a bed. Heart sinking, he thinks he doesn’t know if _he’d_ be comfortable: maybe it’s a little too much, too soon, for both of them.

But then Gus fishes out his phone and turns the torch on just so he can show Jack his face: he jerks his head towards Jack’s bed with a gentle, questioning look and then holds up their conjoined hands. Jack discovers that yes, _absolutely _yes, he would very much like to fall asleep next to Gus. Perhaps moving forwards, he thinks, he really needs to consider whether he truly doesn’t want the kind of things he’s been telling himself he doesn’t want, or there’s just some part of him that’s already decided he’s not going to get them. The thought makes him wistful and scared and happy, all at once.

Self-conscious, Jack slips under the covers without really looking at Gus. He is unspeakably glad when Gus slides under and tucks himself up against his front immediately with no sign of hesitation or self-consciousness. It takes all of the decision making out of his hands, and he can just lie there in the dark and think about this: Gus, warm and solid, pressed up against him from head to toe. How Gus’ breathing deepens as he falls asleep, far faster than Jack thought he was going to. The sleepy, pleased noise he makes when Jack, nervous again for no reason he can think of, hesitantly presses a little kiss against his shoulder.

Despite the comfort of Gus’ weight against his chest, Jack resists going to sleep with everything in him. Part of him wants to stay up and just enjoy thinking about the last thirty minutes for as long as possible – it feels like everything that’s happened has been removed, somehow, from his real life, and going to sleep means waking up the next morning and getting back to it, and he wants to keep that moment from coming as long as possible – but there’s also a very real part of him that knows that when he falls asleep, he’s going to dream, and those dreams are probably going to be absolutely horrible.

So when Hugo gets up to come over and slip under their blankets, he’s still awake. After everything he’s experienced over the last twelve hours, Jack would be afraid when he hears someone start moving around in the darkness, but Hugo’s heavy, thumping footsteps are completely unmistakable from all the times he’s blundered past Jack’s room to the kitchen in the middle of the night. And when he clambers onto the bed next to Jack and, without a word, settles down to gently spoon him, the shape and feel of his broad chest is unmistakable. He doesn’t even say anything when he stretches an arm over Jack and his fingers reach Gus on the other side, where he’s tucked tightly into the curve of Jack’s body.

Teddy, however, complains quietly and bitterly when he clambers over to nestle himself on the other side of Gus and, in the process, accidentally touches Jack’s freezing feet under the blankets. Jack feels Gus wake up and start shaking with laughter in the circle of his arms and softly punches Teddy in the ribs to make him shut up. Not thirty seconds later, he hears Algie pad cautiously over and settle somewhere to the right of Hugo, and although Jack can’t feel him tangle himself into the mess that the rest of them have made – Teddy tugging Gus’ arm over his waist, Hugo gently pressing his face into Jack’s back – Jack hears Hugo grunt a soft hello behind him and he’s absurdly pleased, somehow, that Algie is here in whatever way makes him feel most comfortable.

He hadn’t even realised how stiffly he was holding himself until he finally relaxes: against Gus’ back in front of him, with Hugo’s warm weight behind him. He pushes his face into Gus' hair and, in the darkness, he smiles.

* * *

When he finally does drift off, he doesn’t dream about the mine or the drop or the darkness: he’s standing in the middle of the snowy tundra. Although it’s night, the sky above him is spilling over with stars. Next to him, illuminated in the moonlight reflecting off the snow, is a small man that Jack doesn’t recognise, but he doesn’t need to. Jack knows who he is.

Easily, he holds out a hand. After a second, the man takes it, and they turn to face the east. Jack doesn’t know how he knows which way they’re facing, but he does. And he knows what they’re waiting for, the expectation building in his chest like the crescendo of a song.

“We left the ropes for you,” says Jack. “Did you make it out?”

“In the way that matters,” says the man, and he doesn’t elaborate.

Together, in the distance, over the snow, they watch the sun begin to rise.

**Author's Note:**

> some caving vocabulary
> 
> 1.** sump** \- submerged portion of a cave; you can pass through small ones in a wetsuit  
2.** squeeze/crawl** \- very tight tunnel that you have to crawl through, sometimes too small for hands + knees, psychologically fucked up  
3.** pit/drop/pot** \- height or cliff in cave you need ropes to ascend or descend, also psychologically fucked up  
4.** choke/boulder choke** \- a collection of large rocks you need to navigate in and around, usually by squeezing through  
5.** SRT** \- the method of climbing used in caves: it’s designed so that you and you alone are responsible for your own weight and ropes, although you will have others around you as caving is NOT a solitary sport.  
the title of this fic comes from a concept within SRT which suggests that when you’re getting on and off the main rope at a height you need at least two points of connection to other ropes at ALL times to be safe.  
6.** crabs** \- clips that you use in caving and climbing, short for carabiners, usually used to connect ropes and harnesses for safety  
7.** y-hang** \- the complicated knot at the top of a drop  
8.** belay** \- guide and safety ropes that exist to take your weight if you slip. they are usually either attached to a cave wall or to another person and you attach to them by your cows' tails  
6.** cows' tails** \- very short safety ropes that hang off your harness, you clip them into things like belay ropes and y-hangs to keep yourself falling off stuff
> 
> both the caves Jack explores in this fic exist in real life, including that fucking cursed mining platform, i've just renamed them and the features in them.


End file.
